Movie Review of “An Education”

Yesterday Wonder Boy and I went out to see An Education, one of the ten films nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in this year’s attempt thinly disguised attempt to bolster the economy by nominating more films. I don’t know if this film should have nominated for best film (despite its obvious superiority to District 9, which I don’t think I can review since I only was able to stay in the theater for 40 minutes) but it was very endearing.

Set in the 1960s, An Education focuses on Jenny Mellor. Sixteen year old Jenny lives with her parents just outside of London and has dreams of going to Oxford. it’s hard to say if the dream is hers or her father’s, but regardless, she works hard to get good grades and do well on her exams so the dream can become reality. She leads a very stable, suburban life: goes to school, plays cello, has a small but solid group of girlfriends and gets along well enough with her parents. She’s also very pretty.

I think that is one aspect of the movie that is, perhaps, the most important. In the 1960s women did not yet have open access in to many careers. So much hinged on their looks. Unattractive and you could count on a life of working as a teacher and living alone. Attractive and you strived (and I think that is the right word) to find yourself a man to take care of you, thereby relinquishing you of any duties to work outside of the home (and, if you were very lucky, maybe not even inside the home). But if you found that balance of pretty and smart, then you had a few more options available to you. You could make decisions in your destiny. Rotten decisions by today’s standards, but decisions nonetheless.

Jenny fell into this last group of girls.

One day Jenny meets David Goldman, a man over twice her age. David goes out of his way to show Jenny and her family that his interest in her is not improper and that he wants solely to expose her to cultural activities which she enjoys. (As a viewer, you quickly know that he is slick, and his interest is quite improper.) And as the plot develops, Jenny has decisions to make that are slightly outside of the slim pickings normally presented to girls of her ilk.
I enjoyed An Education quite a bit. I think it would be ridiculous if it won Best Picture because it was simply not good enough to warrant that amount of praise. There was no backstory to the movie, no build up to the plot. The ending was a little forced. But the way the movie was filmed was beautiful and I don’t know how you could stare at Jenny on the screen and not fall in love with her.
It’s definitely a film worth checking out.
This post originally appeared on Kate’s Point of View. © Kate. All rights reserved.