Fridae

The seduction of an innocent is the name of the game, but it’s more commonly played as either a tragedy or a sentimental coming of age tale. An Education muddles the mixture by having a patently sleazy conman and a precocious 17 year old scholarship material type as key players. Better yet, the screenplay by Nick Hornby, (itself an adaptation of prize-winning journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir) overturns the cart completely by telling the seduction as a comedy.

The result is an entirely fresh take on the genre: the screenplay and dialogue implicates the audience in the seduction, whose inevitability becomes comical because David (Peter Sarsgaard) looks like a disreputable younger brother of Kenneth Brannagh, spouting really bad and smarmy lines that nonetheless bowl over Jenny, Carrey Mulligan’s intellectually precocious but pretty much every thing else (especially EQ) retarded naif.

You might call it schadenfreude, but I’d call this classic comedy – which as you know, is just another name for “bad things happening to other people”. It’s not exactly that Jenny deserves what’s coming to her, but that she’s the perfect victim for David’s seduction ritual. Like an excellent heist movie, much joy comes from looking at an improbable plan work perfectly.

But that’s still not what makes An Education great. The beauty of Nick Hornby’s screenplay is how it never reduces the naif to the role of a silly, passive victim or pawn. Hornby’s telling of the seduction puts a surprisingly strong and sympathetic case for Jenny’s acquiescence in the whole sordid affair, to the point where the audience is torn between smirking at David’s seduction or cheering Jenny on for her rite of passage.

Rounding off the brilliant casting are the presence of Alfred Mollina and Emma Thompson, who respectively play Jinny’s boring middle-class father and her principal at school. While set up to represent the stifling and soul-snuffling conformity of early 1960s London, the duo steal scenes with their unexpectedly rich and complex renderings of their characters.