An Education

Because I never need to sleep, I popped "An Education" onto the XBox via Netflix tonight.  Actually, this is a lie: I did it because I'd seen Rosamund Pike absolutely break my heart and kill with her eyes, her voice and just about every weapon you don't have to check on an airplane in "Barney's Version" last week, and because someone I once knew told me that it was a really, really good movie.

I think I'd agree.

I used the "star" thingy to give it four of those star thingies, because in a way I didn't think there was much to that last ten minutes after she asks Olivia Williams for a favour.  Same sort of thing as in The Power of One (see my blathering about that last week), where, wonder of wonder/miracle of miracles, the smart kid gets everything they ever wanted.

Well, it's hard to begrudge certain kids that.  Like The Power of One, the protagonist in An Education is standing in for a real, live person, who grew up fifty or so years ago and wanted to go to Oxford and was smart and witty and maybe teased a bit and learned his or her most important lesson from a series of adults of varying levels of duplicity and protectiveness.  Jenny's stunning, flawless poise and her near-perfect rebuttal and dissection of each and every patronizing argument thrown her way was also a bit of a nice contrast to the simple solutions of Shadow of the Giant and Victim of Circumstance, about which I've blathered more recently.  Every adult, from her adorable parents (yo, Alfred Molina, you make everything good, and Cara Seymour with your mix of mischief and earnestness, just spot on) to her Olivia Williams teacher (flashed me back to Rushmore, actually) to -- briefly -- Emma Thompson's headmistress just falls like domino after domino before her.

Until Emma Thompson gets to be the meanest she's ever been, though, with a single line that reached into my chest like she was Mola Ram.

Now, the whole other side of things, where you'd expect Jenny to be in over her head with Peter Sarsgaard, Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper's gang of worldly bon vivants, she STILL shows breathtaking poise and control, and it's very clear that Sarsgaard's enigmatic David doesn't know exactly what he's gotten into.  For all that he tries to keep his own situations under tight control, he's no match for Jenny.

Really, Carey Mulligan -- Jenny -- is given every opportunity to completely carry this movie, and she does, and everyone involved looks and does great, and it's all basically very great.  Nick Hornby actually wrote it, and it's very nicely written, and I suppose the pat conclusion couldn't veer that far from the memoir on which it was based.  Still -- everything right up to the end was so damned good.  I guess not every movie can be Bad Santa, and end with a dynamite scene that is so rock'n'roll that you just want to lift the TV over your head and sing an AC/DC song.

I think I'm gonna go watch Bad Santa again.