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An Education Reviews

Adapted by Nick Hornby from a memoir by Lynn Barber, this is an enjoyably bracing portrait of a romantic misadventure.

Full Review | Sep 18, 2023

Carey Mulligan’s breakthrough performance in An Education deserves the affection it’s getting and serves as the film’s easiest selling point.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 22, 2023

Soundtracked by the sensuous jazz of the Swinging Sixties, the film is at once stylish and soul-searching, a thoughtful meditation on the pitfalls of grasping for adulthood too soon.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 25, 2021

It is spoiled ... by a rather predictable script and a conventional denouement, and the narrow outlook to which it seems to subscribe.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2021

An Education offers the thrilling sight of a smart young woman in charge of her own sexuality.

Full Review | Jan 23, 2020

Lone Scherfig and her cast and crew give us all AN EDUCATION. Go straight to the head of the class with AN EDUCATION!!

Full Review | Nov 6, 2019

But it's [Carey] Mulligan who shines throughout, bringing a wide-eyed naïve endearing charm to her character, her intelligence and pragmatism making Jenny far more than just a silly schoolgirl.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 29, 2019

Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay by inflating a fragment of Lynn Barber's memoir, failing to disguise the thinness of the material.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 25, 2019

Treats the issues it raises as black and white rather than really exploring them in a satisfying way.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2019

This is a charming coming-of-age film anchored by a star-making turn from lead Carey Mulligan.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | May 10, 2019

It's Lone Scherfig's subtle direction and Mr. Hornby's thoughtful script that make An Education such an interesting film, though.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 1, 2018

Scherfig manages this relationship superbly and it's this central lesson that makes An Education a film that will delight both the young and old.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 4, 2018

This is a nostalgically elegant, comically restrained, cleverly scripted film which, in parts, is also extremely moving.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2018

One of the chief pleasures of Lone Scherfig's crisply confident and charmingly comic coming-of-age drama is in seeing a teenage girl kick against the pricks for a change.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2018

An Education is so good, so intelligent that it invites little shocks of recognition or inspires debate.

Full Review | Feb 5, 2018

This is a lovely, delicious film with fine acting and a unique plot.

Full Review | Jan 17, 2018

What's good about Mulligan's performance is that it's subtle, and seemingly very natural. What's underwhelming about An Education is that all the drama that naturally occurs in a situation like Jenny's was missing.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Sep 11, 2017

Carey Mulligan announces herself as a major name to watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 26, 2014

An Education deserves high marks. You could argue that the central relationship ought to seem sleazier, but Danish director Lone Scherfig perfectly captures the era's look and mood, Hornby's Oscar-nominated script is deft and the performances are spot on

Full Review | Aug 2, 2012

'An Education' is an knowing, affectionate portrait of a man who was surely the best and worst thing that ever happened to a girl who probably should have known better.

Full Review | May 25, 2012

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An education, common sense media reviewers.

Intelligent period drama tackles mature teen topics.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The film pits classroom education vs. real-world e

Jenny is admirable in many ways, especially her th

A couple argues loudly; two guys pilfer a map from

A man in his 30s courts a 16-year-old virgin. In o

“Bloody hell,” “idiot,” and “stupid.”

Car, cigarette, and perfume brands (like Chanel) t

A 16-year-old smokes French cigarettes (Gauloises)

Positive Messages

The film pits classroom education vs. real-world experiences -- but in the end, life demands a far more complex solution. Nevertheless, the importance of knowledge-seeking is made very clear, especially in the way it elevates the status of women.

Positive Role Models

Jenny is admirable in many ways, especially her thirst for knowledge and respect for book learning. Realistically for a teenager, she's also impulsive and drawn to what is mysterious and possibly dangerous -- perhaps not literally, but emotionally (she’ll also fib to get what she wants sometimes). Still, she's able to face her mistakes and herself when necessary. Her parents are both permissive and controlling, which contributes to the situation in which she finds herself -- but they clearly love her.

Violence & Scariness

A couple argues loudly; two guys pilfer a map from a house and brusquely instruct their girlfriends to jump in the car.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A man in his 30s courts a 16-year-old virgin. In one scene, he asks to see her breasts, and she acquiesces -- there’s no nudity, but she's shown opening her blouse. Later, they have sex, though they're only shown after the fact. Some kissing and much flirting. There’s also a somewhat frank discussion about intercourse and a risqué joke about a banana.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Car, cigarette, and perfume brands (like Chanel) that evoke luxury are mentioned or shown.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A 16-year-old smokes French cigarettes (Gauloises). Some social drinking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this smart 1960s-set drama written by popular author Nick Hornby explores a teenager's efforts to define her future, which includes making a mess of her well-laid plans -- most notably by becoming involved in a relationship with a sophisticated man nearly twice her age. Virginity, education, class -- they're all up for discussion and questioning. These are mature themes, but older teens should get a lot out of the movie. There's some sexual content (implied nudity and intercourse, kissing, and some risque discussion), as well as some era-accurate social drinking and smoking. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (2)
Kids say (10)

Based on 2 parent reviews

Wonderful film!!

Only for adults and maybe older teens, what's the story.

Sixteen-year-old Jenny ( Carey Mulligan ) has fixed her sights on Oxford, and her striving dad ( Alfred Molina ) is happy to keep the pressure on until she gets there. Her teacher (Olivia White) believes she has what it takes, and Jenny does, too. But her plans are waylaid when she meets David ( Peter Sarsgaard ), a thirtysomething mystery man who hangs out with a fast crowd that introduces Jenny to a heady world of jazz, high art, fashion, Paris, and passion. How can the world of books compete?

Is It Any Good?

There are quibbles aplenty with AN EDUCATION -- Sarsgaard's wreck of an accent, to start, and a third act that attempts to wrap up too quickly to boot. But neither detracts from the period drama's considerable heft. This is a seriously good film. Nick Hornby , who wrote the screenplay based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, keeps the feel modern despite the 1960s setting (which is gorgeously rendered) with dialogue shot through the heart with essential truths.

And with Mulligan reciting Hornby's words, he can't lose. Watching her navigate the perils of near-adulthood is like an epiphany, and while Sarsgaard's accent is a throwaway, his acting isn't -- few actors can make creepy seem so appealing. Director Lone Scherfig presents London and Paris with a knowing glow -- Jenny is a firefly, and her wings, as we can only expect, will get scalded, if not burned. And yet we can't stop watching.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how the movie portrays teen sexuality . How different do you think that depiction would be if the movie was set today, instead of in the '60s?

What is the movie saying about the value of education? Does book learning always trump real-life adventure, or is life not that simple?

What do you think of Jenny's apparent change-of-heart about pursuingOxford? Why does she seem ready to forgo what she's worked for topursue a fling with a much older man (who may, in fact, not be exactlywho she thinks he is)?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 9, 2009
On DVD or streaming : March 30, 2010
Cast : Alfred Molina , Carey Mulligan , Peter Sarsgaard , Rosamund Pike
Director : Lone Scherfig
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Sony Pictures Classics
Genre : Drama
Run time : 95 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : mature thematic material involving sexual content, and for smoking
Last updated : July 7, 2022

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Movie Review | 'An Education'

Beware of Strangers Bearing Champagne

Share full article

By A.O. Scott

Oct. 8, 2009

Literature is full of cautionary tales of innocent young women seduced by smooth-talking rakes. Jenny, a dutiful student and a passionate consumer of modern novels and French pop records, has surely encountered more than a few such stories. But at 16 and in a terrible hurry, she seems less inclined to learn from the mistakes of wayward romantic heroines than to join their ranks.

In a Henry James novel, Jenny would be an eager American ingénue arriving in Europe to drain the cup of experience to its dregs. But in “An Education,” a sprightly and slippery new film adapted from a short, sharp memoir by the British journalist Lynn Barber, she is a middle-class adolescent, languishing in the London suburb of Twickenham in 1961.

Jenny, played with preternatural wit by the 24-year-old British actress Carey Mulligan, is passionate, inquisitive and smart, bound for Oxford and stifled by her starchy private school and her anxious, proper parents (Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina).

One rainy afternoon, a snake slithers into the drab little garden of Jenny’s life, and her curiosity about this suave stranger is accompanied by a sense of relief. At last, something is going to happen. He seems quite harmless at first interesting, but not in a dangerous way. His name is David, he is around 30, reasonably handsome (played by the quietly dashing Peter Sarsgaard), Jewish and fluent in a language of style and culture that Jenny is only beginning to learn. Noticing that she is lugging her cello, David chats with her about the British composer Edward Elgar, and before she knows it, he is squiring her to art auctions and concerts, plying her with Champagne and cigarettes and airy, high-minded talk.

Another shoe is sure to drop, but the director, Lone Scherfig, and the screenwriter, Nick Hornby, let it float gradually and gently to the ground. It is vital to the movie’s delicate, comic tone that intimations of the predatory, duplicitous aspects of David’s character do not emerge too suddenly. Jenny is smitten, and so, rather astonishingly, are her parents, in particular her conservative and unworldly father, who all but delivers his daughter to her seducer tied up in a bow, believing that this is an opportunity for her social advancement.

The audience, too, needs to be fooled for a while, and Mr. Sarsgaard handles a tricky role with sly aplomb, allowing doubt and then revulsion to mix, drop by drop, into our impression of him. David and his fabulous friends, Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), turn out not to be the high-living swells Jenny takes them for, but something rather more tawdry. And yet, even as she begins to see through them, and David in particular, Jenny plays along with their charade, as if determined to follow her experiment to its conclusion.

This turns out to be both foreseeable and surprising. Jenny makes no secret of her relationship with David, which becomes the talk of her school, attracting the concern of a sad, kindly young teacher (Olivia Williams) and the fierce disapproval of the headmistress (Emma Thompson, taking a practice run at her inevitable portrayal of Margaret Thatcher).

But Jenny’s course is set. It’s not that she’s out of control quite the contrary. She is deliberately and systematically, with what she imagines to be full knowledge of the consequences, seeking out what the vestigial Victorianism of her era would see as her ruin.

And the era itself is the real subject of “An Education,” which catches Britain around the time when, as Philip Larkin put it in his famous poem, “sexual intercourse began.” There is a bit of that stuff in “An Education,” but it’s more the symbol of other kinds of experience than the reverse. What Jenny craves is not the fact of sex though she does make sure to schedule the loss of her virginity but full access to an ideal of sexiness, a world that is the opposite of the boring little England she knows and loathes. Even as David is taking advantage of her innocence, she is, at first unwittingly and then more brazenly, using him to find her way to that world, which she identifies especially with France.

In the film’s historical view Jenny is a generational pioneer, and Ms. Scherfig and Mr. Hornby make some effort to reckon the costs of her exploration as well as the thrills. Tears do flow after the Champagne is all drunk. But the filmmakers themselves seem too intoxicated by the mystique of the period to take full account of the sad, bleak aspects of the story they have to tell. At crucial moments the movie recoils from its own implications and finds a default tone of wry comedy when something more stringent and difficult is called for.

But if in hindsight “An Education” might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself. Some of this allure arises from the appeal of a moment in the past that seems, in “Mad Men” and beyond, to be enjoying some cultural cachet. And Ms. Scherfig, a Danish filmmaker whose previous work includes “Italian for Beginners,” the only comedy the Dogme 95 movement has ever produced, and the morbidly charming “Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself,” catches some of the headlong energy of the British and French New Waves that were part of Jenny’s world.

Even as its heroine blazes a path toward the new, “An Education,” perhaps inevitably, drifts toward nostalgia. The film might have had some of the heft and complication of a novel but instead, as with so much of Mr. Hornby’s work, like “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy,” it is content to be a deftly turned pop artifact. It’s a pleasure which I don’t mean entirely as a compliment.

“An Education” is rated PG-13. Its sexual implications are not as troubling as they should be.

AN EDUCATION

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Lone Scherfig; written by Nick Hornby, based on a memoir by Lynn Barber; director of photography, John de Borman; edited by Barney Pilling; music by Paul Englishby; production designer, Andrew McAlpine; produced by Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

WITH: Carey Mulligan (Jenny), Peter Sarsgaard (David), Dominic Cooper (Danny), Rosamund Pike (Helen), Alfred Molina (Jack), Cara Seymour (Marjorie), Matthew Beard (Graham), Emma Thompson (Headmistress), Olivia Williams (Miss Stubbs), Sally Hawkins (Sarah), Amanda Fairbank-Hynes (Hattie) and Ellie Kendrick (Tina).

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An Education

I n the 1980s, David Puttnam produced a series of films for TV and cinema under the title First Love , the aim being to bring in new movie-makers and writers to work on personal themes in British settings. The most notable was Pat O'Connor's somewhat atypical Cal , where the love affair was between an IRA gunman and the widow of a police officer he's killed. Otherwise, they tended towards bittersweet romanticism of a nostalgic kind and An Education , adapted by Nick Hornby from journalist Lynn Barber 's memoir of her 1960s schooldays, would have fitted perfectly into this series.

Indeed, two of the most attractive First Love films were semi-autobiographical works scripted by contemporaries of Barber's: Those Glory Glory Days , inspired by Julie Welch's passion for Danny Blanchflower's Spurs team of 1960-61, and The Frog Prince , Posy Simmonds 's witty account of her adolescent sojourn in 1960 Paris, fending off amorous French youths and losing her virginity to one of them.

An Education is set in 1962, the heroine is 16-year-old London schoolgirl Jenny Miller (Carey Mulligan), the only child of conventional, lower-middle-class parents, and the film's title has a double meaning, one scholastic, the other sentimental. First, it refers to her sixth-form work at a Twickenham girls' school, the prize pupil of Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), her intense English teacher, and the imminent prospect of winning a place at Oxford that will transform her life. It also refers to the dangerous relationship that begins when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a seemingly wealthy charmer, gives her a lift home in his Bristol sports car one rainy day and that threatens to deflect her disastrously from this liberating future.

The world of the early 60s is well established: this period of Macmillan's "Never had it so good" Britain, immediately before 1963, that pivotal year apostrophised by Philip Larkin, when the Profumo scandal opened up to view a different, more corrupt nation, and the Beatles, the Stones and the great train robbers ushered in the swinging 60s and the permissive society.

Danish director Lone Scherfig seems at home in Britain and the details of clothes, haircuts and so on are dead right. The period comes uncannily back as Jenny lies in her bedroom listening to a Juliette Gréco LP (France was then the acme of cultural sophistication) playing on a Dansette record player. The horrors of lower-middle-class suburbia, intended no doubt subjectively to suggest Jenny's revulsion and alienation, are rather caricatured in the performance of Alfred Molina as her humourless, insecure, bullying father.

It is also a pity that in order to build her up as a rebellious outsider, Jenny's two closest chums are presented as giggly admirers and the other girls in her class as dull, unimaginative frumps incapable of responding to King Lear and Jane Eyre with a sensitivity and intelligence comparable to Jenny's. Equally, Miss Stubbs, admirably played by Olivia Williams, is seen as a spinster, possibly a lesbian unfulfilled by her life of culture, and while the headmistress (Emma Thompson) may have harboured a traditional middle-class anti-semitism, one wonders whether the corresponding character in real life would have been so strident in her denunciation of Jews as Christ-killers.

Of Carey Mulligan's wonderful performance there can be no doubt. She exudes vitality and an unformed inner grace and she blossoms under the attentions of David, whose dubious friends are the charismatic spiv Danny (Dominic Cooper) and the beautiful, amoral airhead Helen (Rosamund Pike). The latter gives Jenny a makeover that recreates her as Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's , the hit movie of the moment. David, who at his first meeting with Jenny identifies himself as Jewish, wins over her parents with his wit and worldly charm and introduces her to a glittering world of classical concerts, nightclubs, greyhound tracks and fast cars.

But David soon reveals himself to the audience, though only partially to Jenny, as a liar, a confidence trickster, a thief and an associate of Peter Rachman, the Polish property racketeer who become infamous the following year when, after his death, his connection with the Profumo affair was revealed (both Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler had been his mistresses) and the term "Rachmanism" was coined. But so in thrall to his gaudy lifestyle does she become that she eventually allows him to take her virginity on a trip to Paris for her 17th birthday.

What David wants we can only guess at, and at the end we're invited to conclude that he has a psychopathic inability to consider the consequences of his actions. The movie ends wistfully with Duffy singing Smoke Without Fire : "If I had known you were cheating me/ I would have saved myself and set you free."

We're not told what happened to David. We see Jenny scraping into Oxford (though the film errs in her being offered a place by the English faculty rather than by a college) and start dating boys her own age. We guess that the experience shaped Lynn Barber, the ace interviewer, by making her wary of the persona people present to the world. But her piece in the Observer four years ago about accompanying Ronnie Wood and Tracey Emin to an endless succession of fashionable drunken parties at the Venice Biennale suggests she retains her taste for louche company.

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COMMENTS

An Education
Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 22, 2023. Yasmin Omar Harper's Bazaar. Soundtracked by the sensuous jazz of the Swinging Sixties, the film is at once stylish and soul-searching, a ...
An Education Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 2 ): Kids say ( 10 ): There are quibbles aplenty with AN EDUCATION -- Sarsgaard's wreck of an accent, to start, and a third act that attempts to wrap up too quickly to boot. But neither detracts from the period drama's considerable heft. This is a seriously good film.
A Wry Romance, With Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard
An Education. Directed by Lone Scherfig. Drama. PG-13. 1h 40m. By A.O. Scott. Oct. 8, 2009. Literature is full of cautionary tales of innocent young women seduced by smooth-talking rakes. Jenny, a ...
An Education
An Education is set in 1962, the heroine is 16-year-old London schoolgirl Jenny Miller (Carey Mulligan), the only child of conventional, lower-middle-class parents, and the film's title has a ...