REVIEW: 'An Education' teaches about importance of brilliant actors

GRADE: B+

“An Education,” thematically complex, elegantly fashioned and breathtakingly acted, is a poignant coming-of-age story for both a character and a country, essentially a soap opera made vibrantly electric. But, unhappily, it is a very good film that stumbles in the home stretch and just misses out on being a great film.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is 16 going on 36, an astonishingly bright and self-assured girl who yearns to escape her suffocating provincial London suburb and the girls’ preparatory school that cares as much, if not more, for transforming its charges into proper young women as it does reading, writing and arithmetic. The year is 1961 and stuffy old England is just shy of embracing Swinging Sixties liberation. Jenny imagines herself at Oxford, a place, in her mind at least, of unbridled intellectual Bohemianism.

But the path to get there is anything but. Everything she does, from studying Latin to playing the cello, is meant to maximize her chances of being selected for the prestigious university.

Enter the dashing, handsome, well off David (Peter Sarsgaard). David is a libertine who lives a heady life of lavish excess. He is an exotic man of the world who offers to enroll Jenny in the school of life. Obviously, he is a cad. Men in their 30s do not prey on teenage girls without tasting blood in the pubescent waters.

But David is so genteel, warm and believable that, though we are certain he is up to no good, we can never truly bring ourselves to loathe him.

The smooth talker ingratiates himself into Jenny’s family with an astounding charm offensive.

David takes Jenny away for long weekend trips, including Paris (if he is using her, it must be said she is using him, too) and introduces her to his high-living friends (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike) who, of course, are not quite what they appear.

Jenny stays with David, even after she grows suspicious of his intentions, because, with him at least, life is not boring.

Eventually, however, David’s meticulously maintained plot crumbles, leaving Jenny unsure if she can salvage her academic future, much less her now-very-publicly soiled reputation.

Danish director Lone Scherfig and screenwriter Nick Hornby (“About a Boy,” “High Fidelity”) have made an exquisite film, simple and classy. They’ve based their work on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, who herself carried on a two-year affair with a much older man while still a schoolgirl.

For most of its running time, “An Education” positively purrs, but as it rounds the final lap — rushed, tidy and relatively consequence free — it becomes profoundly dishonest. Just at the moment you would expect it to say, “See here, these are the wages of sin,” it skulks cowardly away from the very confrontation the plot demands.

Jenny’s hard life lessons could have — realistically should have — been harder, but instead “An Education” makes her into some sort of feminist vanguard and seems to suggest that mistake or no, we’d never go back and undo our blunders for they are the very things that make us who we are.

That, of course, is one of life’s great paradoxes — maturity is gained not through ecstasy but through agony. Yet who among us wouldn’t wish away our most profound mistakes no matter how wise it made us in the end?

The acting in “An Education” absolutely sparkles. Alfred Molina is a scene-stealer, shockingly blind to his paternal duties and protective instincts. Molina’s Jack does not even realize that he is selling his daughter off to the highest bidder like so much chattel.

Sarsgaard plays David as a dirty rotten scamp but one so bright and charming and so un-predatory that even we occasionally doubt our suspicions that he must be a cad.

But if any actor owns “An Education,” it is Mulligan, who, in her first big role, allows us to observe and participate in something truly special — the birth of a major talent.

Mulligan, who seems, at times, to be channeling Audrey Hepburn, is quite simply astonishing.

Hers should be the first name springing to everyone’s lips come the nominations for the Academy Awards.

An Education

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour, Emma Thompson

Director: Lone Scherfig

Theaters: Kimball’s

Rating: Rated PG-13 (for mature thematic material involving sexual content and for smoking)

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes