Youth speaks in hyperbole: “Best night of my life,” exclaims 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny, after a night of music and cigarettes with a mysteriously alluring older man. But she isn’t exaggerating: It’s 1961 England, a gray and unBeatled land. Fun hasn’t been invented yet.
As Jenny, newcomer Carey Mulligan makes you feel sorry for Meryl Streep, whose Oscar chances for next winter just took an ice pick to the heart.
Commanding the screen with an impossibly regal ease, Mulligan’s Jenny is ruthlessly poised, too bright for her own good and more grown-up than her own fluttering dad (Alfred Molina) or her sly middle-aged boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard, dragging along a dodgy English accent). She makes you want to scramble to help Jenny on her way, even when she’s going in completely the wrong direction.
Jenny, the kind of girl who unnecessarily ends sentences with “n’est-ce pas?” and speaks excitedly of all the books she’s going to read and all the thoughts she’s going to think, is studying to get not so much into Oxford as out of her stale, middle-class, weak-tea London. Among bookish romantic girls, Jenny is an action hero and the movie is a sort of escape from Alcatraz.
A funny, lean script by “High Fidelity” author Nick Hornby (from a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber) and precise direction by Denmark’s Lone Scherfig make the most of Mulligan — even when she’s in the background, you can’t stop watching her in case she hitches an eyebrow — but their film is tightly plotted, too, each scene soaked in consequence.
Should Jenny get in the car when David (Sarsgaard), a total stranger, pulls up alongside her, rakish in the rain? When she learns more about who he really is, should she be put off or cheered by his vision? And isn’t the education she is getting from David (auctions at Christie’s, weekends in Paris) superior to the damp routine of entrance exams, Oxford, marriage and a job ladling out the Brontes to next-gen Jennys? Aha, notes her father: There’s much more to life than all that. There’s also the Civil Service.
Yet as a friend of David’s (Rosamund Pike, button-eyed and irresistible) points out, Jenny’s attention to her Latin studies is pointless because “In 50 years, no one will speak Latin, probably. Not even Latin people.”
If the comedy leans slightly on caricature (that “not even Latin people” is superfluous, and the conversation between Jenny’s dad and mum can be a bit Archie-and-Edith), “An Education” remains one of the richest, most beguiling and even most suspenseful films of the year. The rinsed-out photography (particularly during a Paris interlude lit like early-’60s French cinema) and sets immerse you in the period instead of drawing attention to it. Even a birthday cake looks meek and deflated, though Scherfig doesn’t do a close-up — the movie equivalent of a rim shot.
Hornby’s typically witty dialogue, meanwhile, is a great pleasure, gliding from Jenny’s hunger (“I’m going to talk to people who know lots about lots”) to her father’s harrumphing. When she says a boy she knows might become a famous writer some day, he declares, “Becoming one isn’t the same as knowing one.”
Despite the lingering aroma of Victorian rot shrouding 1961, “An Education” is excitingly young. Whether Jenny puts her hair up or keeps it down, does her Latin homework, goes to France or looks in a glove compartment could open up worlds or close them off forever. It’s an epic, being 16: Everything is huge or horrible.
kyle.smith@nypost.com