Review: 'An Education' confronts innocence on the edge

Jenny is an unsure girl in an unsure time.

She's about to graduate high school in early '60s London. Her father has her pointed toward Oxford, her teachers are encouraging and yet ... life all seems so planned, so according to someone else's script.

But while standing in the rain one day with her cello, Jenny (Carey Mulligan) runs into the much older and suave David (Peter Sarsgaard). He gives her a ride home. They run into one another again. And then he asks her out.

Impossible! She's so young! But David comes to her home and charms Jenny's old man (Alfred Molina) into letting her go out. Soon enough, perfect schoolgirl Jenny is on the town, drinking Champagne, smoking cigarettes and dancing the night away.

The viewer knows right off the bat that little good can come of the relationship between Jenny and David, and Sarsgaard's charm has just enough heavy-lidded menace to let us know something's off there as well.

But Jenny doesn't see it, and "An Education" turns into just that, a young girl's introduction to life's thrills and consequences.

Director Lone Scherfig, working off Nick Hornsby's adaptation of a memoir by Lynn Barber, creates a wonderful sense of pre-swinging London, more '50s than '60s, with its sense of structure and aspiration.

And the lovely unknown Mulligan, with her dazzling smile and long-limbed natural elegance, is a perfect Jenny. Whether she's an awfully good actress for her age or just an exquisite fit for the character, she gives a casually dazzling performance.

But then Hornsby's script allows most of these characters to breathe, from Molina's duped, loving father to Rosamund Pike, hilarious as a sweetly dim-witted party girl, to a wonderfully understated turn by Olivia Williams as Jenny's teacher and an iron-hard cameo from that most graceful of actresses, Emma Thompson, as the school's principal.

The film turns on Sarsgaard's David, though, and the actor unveils Jenny's suitor at just the right pace. In terms of soul, he shrinks as she grows.

There are conveniences in Hornsby's script -- Jenny's parents are too easily convinced of David's good intentions, Jenny is a bit too brazen at school -- but the acting ensemble here works so well, and Mulligan is such a luminous find that this fairly simple tale of innocence lost becomes something special.

A seemingly sure Oscar contender that could also be the starting block for a major talent, "An Education" may also boast the best acting ensemble of the year.

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