This isn't much of a movie.
But then, 2009 wasn't much of a year for movies. Ten nominees for Best Picture, with barely enough content between them for five; half-realized works, half servings. In those cases, shouldn't movie admissions be halved also?
An Education--the half that's there--is essentially an English New Wave movie from fifty years ago, emasculated and prettified: in place of gritty documentary-style backgrounds we get a genteel pastel wash where all the details are blurred. Neither the settings nor the characters seem of the period. The 16-year-old schoolgirl looks 22, and her Jewish boyfriend looks less Jewish than her Gentile father. Their affair, the subject of the movie, is dramatized so circumspectly that it barely shows on screen. The movie makers seem to have been nervous about audience reaction to this; and the reaction they've gotten, despite all their pussyfooting, suggests they had the audience's measure.
Has it really only been a decade since American Beauty? Somewhere in the interim, the public (or tabloid) definition of pedophilia has been extended upward to the age of 16 or 17, so that a 30-something guy sleeping with a girl half his age is now perceived as a pervert. The word "creepy" keeps recurring in reference to this movie. Has everyone forgotten what it was like to be 16? When I was growing up 50 years ago, plenty of teen girls got crushes on older guys; a few slept with them. The latter was considered immoral and disreputable but not perverse. Now, however, a movie like this apparently has to tiptoe all around its subject, and so the teen isn't really a teen and the lovers aren't really lovers; the actors playing the roles are virtually sexless, or have been directed to act as if they were, with no hint of erotic or romantic attraction between them.
That's not the only thing missing. The plot required the establishing of only a very few essentials: the girl's feeling of stultification at school, the excitement the guy brings her, a vague sense of something not quite right there. All these could have been communicated in one two-minute scene. and the movie fails to put them across in two hours. Its mind seems to be elsewhere. But where?
Well, what I got from it in the end was a different story from the one seemingly being told. Ignoring the surface details, as if the sound were turned down, what I seemed to be seeing was a story about a college girl and a low-level professional who try to have a romance but give up in the end because they both swing the other way. The guy is in love with his gay partner, the girl with her gay teacher; but, being that this is 1960, they're all content to stay in the closet. Actually the last point has to be inferred, since the movie gives no visual clue to the fates of the characters, or to much of anything else either; in general, it makes so little use of the screen it would have been better suited to Radio 4 (see first paragraph, above).
Postscript:
Having now read the chapter of Lynn Barber's memoir the movie is based on, I found that it filled in what was missing on screen. It's a wry, self-critical account leading to the conclusion "I was damaged by my education"--that damage being a permanent distrust of everyone. The boyfriend is described as a short, ugly man who "talked in different accents and lied about his age, and whose stories didn't add up." The girl recognized this, he and she had no sex life to speak of, and he ended up in prison for writing bad checks. The movie softens the facts of their relationship to the point of falsity, and as counterpoint turns the secondary characters into cartoons. Her father, for example, did throw them into bed together, as Barber puts it, but she makes it clear, as the movie doesn't, that he had a lifelong fear of the poverty he'd experienced as a child, and so must have been drawn by the boyfriend's appearance of wealth.
More of a sketch than other parts of the memoir, this chapter communicates motive and environment largely by indication; the movie misses many of the cues laid down and takes the characters in directions other than indicated, so that their actions no longer make sense. It would seem that more careful reading was called for.
But then, 2009 wasn't much of a year for movies. Ten nominees for Best Picture, with barely enough content between them for five; half-realized works, half servings. In those cases, shouldn't movie admissions be halved also?
An Education--the half that's there--is essentially an English New Wave movie from fifty years ago, emasculated and prettified: in place of gritty documentary-style backgrounds we get a genteel pastel wash where all the details are blurred. Neither the settings nor the characters seem of the period. The 16-year-old schoolgirl looks 22, and her Jewish boyfriend looks less Jewish than her Gentile father. Their affair, the subject of the movie, is dramatized so circumspectly that it barely shows on screen. The movie makers seem to have been nervous about audience reaction to this; and the reaction they've gotten, despite all their pussyfooting, suggests they had the audience's measure.
Has it really only been a decade since American Beauty? Somewhere in the interim, the public (or tabloid) definition of pedophilia has been extended upward to the age of 16 or 17, so that a 30-something guy sleeping with a girl half his age is now perceived as a pervert. The word "creepy" keeps recurring in reference to this movie. Has everyone forgotten what it was like to be 16? When I was growing up 50 years ago, plenty of teen girls got crushes on older guys; a few slept with them. The latter was considered immoral and disreputable but not perverse. Now, however, a movie like this apparently has to tiptoe all around its subject, and so the teen isn't really a teen and the lovers aren't really lovers; the actors playing the roles are virtually sexless, or have been directed to act as if they were, with no hint of erotic or romantic attraction between them.
That's not the only thing missing. The plot required the establishing of only a very few essentials: the girl's feeling of stultification at school, the excitement the guy brings her, a vague sense of something not quite right there. All these could have been communicated in one two-minute scene. and the movie fails to put them across in two hours. Its mind seems to be elsewhere. But where?
Well, what I got from it in the end was a different story from the one seemingly being told. Ignoring the surface details, as if the sound were turned down, what I seemed to be seeing was a story about a college girl and a low-level professional who try to have a romance but give up in the end because they both swing the other way. The guy is in love with his gay partner, the girl with her gay teacher; but, being that this is 1960, they're all content to stay in the closet. Actually the last point has to be inferred, since the movie gives no visual clue to the fates of the characters, or to much of anything else either; in general, it makes so little use of the screen it would have been better suited to Radio 4 (see first paragraph, above).
Postscript:
Having now read the chapter of Lynn Barber's memoir the movie is based on, I found that it filled in what was missing on screen. It's a wry, self-critical account leading to the conclusion "I was damaged by my education"--that damage being a permanent distrust of everyone. The boyfriend is described as a short, ugly man who "talked in different accents and lied about his age, and whose stories didn't add up." The girl recognized this, he and she had no sex life to speak of, and he ended up in prison for writing bad checks. The movie softens the facts of their relationship to the point of falsity, and as counterpoint turns the secondary characters into cartoons. Her father, for example, did throw them into bed together, as Barber puts it, but she makes it clear, as the movie doesn't, that he had a lifelong fear of the poverty he'd experienced as a child, and so must have been drawn by the boyfriend's appearance of wealth.
More of a sketch than other parts of the memoir, this chapter communicates motive and environment largely by indication; the movie misses many of the cues laid down and takes the characters in directions other than indicated, so that their actions no longer make sense. It would seem that more careful reading was called for.