An Education is both a very scary and ultimately very satisfying movie. Any film that balances tension in such an evocative way deserves attention and this one more than most.  Fortunately, it got it in the form of three Academy Award nominations in 2010, for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actress.

It takes place in 1961 in London, where sixteen year old Jenny Mellor (Carey Mulligan) labors in a private school. Her middle-class parents Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour) have scrimped and saved for years so that she can get a proper education and go to Oxford, but Jenny is bored with her life and questions whether the effort is worth it.  She has reached the conclusion that once you graduate college, something inside you dies and she wants to experience life before that happens.

While waiting in the rain for a bus, a car pulls up to the curb. A dashing older man, David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), offers to give her cello a ride and she eventually climbs in with it.  This is the beginning of an elaborate seduction.  He offers to take her to a concert and then charmingly talks her parents into allowing her.  Jack and Marjorie are extremely impressed with this rich man and are complicit in his seduction.  But David is lying about his “Aunt Helen” being a chaperone.  He introduces her to his friend and business associate Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Danny’s girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike).  After the concert, they go to a jazz club and Jenny begins to see another side of life.  She finds it exciting and different and she wants more.  David cons Jenny’s parents into letting her go to Oxford with him for a weekend under the pretense of meeting his old teacher, C. S. Lewis, and they readily agree.  He buys a copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe fakes Lewis’ signature and the quartet set out to party.

Although Jenny shares a bed with David, she tells him that she will not give up her virginity until she is seventeen and he contents himself with a peek at her breasts. Over the weekend, they are driving through the country and see a house for sale.  David and Danny park and walk toward the entrance, but when Jenny makes to go with them Danny sternly tells her she has to stay with Helen.  As they wait, Helen tells her to be ready to leave in a hurry and after a while, David and Danny sprint from the house carrying an old map that they have stolen.  They quickly drive away and back at the hotel, Jenny takes off, telling them she can find her own way home.  David follows her and smooth-talks her into staying.

By this point, he is lavishing money on her, buying her clothes and taking her to expensive restaurants. It is a glimpse of the rich life for which she’s acquiring a definite taste.  For her seventeenth birthday, David takes her Paris.  He tells her parents that Aunt Helen will again chaperone, but this time it is just the two of them.  She is enthralled and gives up her virginity on the trip.  Back in London, the four of them go the dog races and then party in the club afterward, but when David sees Jenny and Danny flirting as they dance, he panics.  In the parking lot afterward, he asks Jenny to marry him.

I won’t give away the rest of the story.

The direction by Lone Scherfig is outstanding. One might think this is a fairly long film at one hour and fifty minutes, but it really flies by.  When I looked at the Special Features on the DVD and saw the deleted scenes, I realized that it could have been longer and not suffered at all, but the cuts were very judicious.  There is also an alternate ending that viewers might find interesting.  The script by Nick Hornby is based on a memoir of the same name by British journalist Lynn Barber and it is terrific, as befit its nomination.

The acting is uniformly good, but Mulligan, an amateur when she came into the production, is wonderful and makes the film believable beginning to end. Getting a nomination on your first ever acting job is simply spectacular.  Although her character really makes the film work, all of the supporting performances are great, especially the always brilliant Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour.  American Sarsgaard holds up well against his British counterparts in the movie and Emma Thompson even makes an appearance as the Headmistress of the girls school.  Everyone is terrific.

The art direction is also wonderful, as 1961 London is perfectly created, not a blemish in sight and everything chosen perfectly.

It’s not an easy to movie to like, but Jenny muddles her way through the mess and comes out on the other side no worse for wear. She certainly gets the worldly education she sought and is an adult by the time she begins Oxford with “boys.”  This is a film with many adult situations, so I do not recommend it for children under thirteen, but there is no nudity or sexually graphic situations, so it isn’t strictly adults only.  In fact, I would recommend this movie to teenagers as there is a lot to learn from Jenny’s experience.  Ultimately, it is an extremely good movie that deserves its due.  I highly recommend it.

This review contains spoilers.

Based on the novel The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger, the 2006 film of the same name brings a great deal to the table, namely moral, ethical, and economic issues usually absent from a comedy more concerned with appearance than reality. If you spend any time at all examining different takes on the David Frankel film, you will find a full range of opinions as to whether they got the fashion world right, whether they perverted the novel, even the simple question: is it any good?

Young Andrea (“Andy”) Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is looking for her first job as a journalist in New York City. She is a bit of slob, but she applies for a job at Runway, the world’s leading fashion magazine as an administrative assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the most powerful person in the world of fashion.  Miranda’s first assistant, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) cannot believe that Human Resources would send someone so unfashionable for an interview. In spite of how bad it goes, Miranda hires her anyway.

The job is horrible. Miranda is a cold, insensitive, domineering woman who makes completely unreasonable demands on her assistants, Emily is a complete snob, and Andy fails time and again in doing a good job.  She complains to her boyfriend, Nate Cooper (Adrian Grenier), a chef, and Lily (Tracie Thoms) who runs an art gallery and makes fun of the ephemeral world she works in.  Nonetheless, she continues because of the boost such an assignment might give her career.

At wit’s end, she solicits help from the only friendly person at Runway, Nigel (Stanley Tucci), the Art Director. Although at Size 6, she is considered “fat,” Andy blooms overnight into a fashion afficianado under Nigel’s guidance and she begins to gain Miranda’s trust, so much so that she is entrusted with delivering the mock-up book of the magazine to Miranda’s home.  Although Emily gives her explicit instructions on how to do it, Andy is distracted by Miranda’s twin girls and accidentally overhears an argument between Miranda and her husband.  Offended, Miranda gives her the impossible task of obtaining the latest Harry Potter book for her twins, even though it hasn’t been published yet.  Andy solicits the help of a successful writer she met at a party, Christian Thompson (Simon Baker) who comes through for her.  Thus proven, Miranda increasingly adopts Andy as her prime assistant and demotes Emily, going so far as to banish Emily from the annual trip to Paris and giving the opportunity to Andy.  To make the assignment as nasty as possible, Miranda forces Andy to give Emily the news.

After missing Nate’s birthday because of work, her relationship becomes strained and falls apart. In Paris, she sleeps with Christian and watches as a political move by Miranda kills Nigel’s big chance to leave Runway and take part in a major worldwide release of a fashion mogul.  All along this chain of events, Andy is given warnings that she has changed too much and she doesn’t believe them, until she is in Miranda’s car in Paris and Miranda tells her that they are very much alike.  Andy doesn’t believe it, saying that she would never do a thing like Miranda had just done to Nigel.  Amused, Miranda tells her that she has already done such a thing–to Emily.

Disillusioned, Andy walks out and seeks her future elsewhere. 

My first reaction was that I didn’t like the movie.

I didn’t like what I saw as an homage to a plastic world where so much time, energy, and currency are wasted. After all, we have serious problems in this world and we are certainly no closer to solving them when billions of dollars of our resources are essentially flushed down the toilet on fashion that will be old and discarded in a matter of weeks.

I didn’t like the stereotyped characters up to and–yes–including Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Miranda, but I do believe that is more due to the script than Streep’s acting. The same could be said for most of the characters.  Hathaway is fine as Andy, although I wondered sometimes at her casual reaction to tongue-lashings that would have made most of us upset.  The best performances in the movie are given by Emily Blunt, who is allowed to bring great humanity to Emily (the script) and Stanley Tucci, whose own remarkable performance makes Nigel a three-dimensional character.

Aside from being a predictable plot, which isn’t always a bad thing, the holes in the story are deep and wide. After a lifetime of leaning on highly fashionable assistants and with a “million girls” aching for the job, why on earth would Miranda suddenly, inexplicably hire a slob?  There is no motivation at all for “giving the smart, fat girl a chance.”  Having worked for some powerful people in my time as an Administrative Assistant, I can say with some authority that Andy’s failures simply would not be tolerated on any level, yet the powerful Miranda never actually fires her.  Miranda herself shows so little humanity that she comes across completely as a stereotype.  Then there is the question of why Andy herself never leaves the job.  She is not functioning as a journalist on the staff, she already has the job on her resume, and there is no reason at all for her to stay, especially given the opinions of Nate and Lily.  Add to that all of the instances where it is pointed out to her that she’s changing in a profound and unappealing way and yet she doesn’t get it.  I lost respect for her and wondered how this intelligent, down-to-earth girl could possibly be seduced to the point where she cannot see the painfully obvious shallow person she is becoming.  That disrespect was fully cemented when she slept with Christian.

Given all of this, it just seems very strange that her one little scene with Miranda in the car would create the kind of transformation where she could walk away. My first reaction when she did walk away was:  How can you be so stupid?  Give two weeks notice!  Don’t just walk out, but be smart about it.  And later, how could Miranda possibly give her a positive reference after she walked out like that. 

These are all very serious issues.

But when I thought about it, a number of other things occurred to me. First, the film paints the fashion world in such a shallow, mean light that it is actually doing something right.  That most people didn’t see that is something of a wonder.  When I watched the special features on the DVD, Frankel and the producer, Wendy Finerman, said they especially tailored the script to make the fashion world look good.  Although I haven’t read the novel, it certainly made me wonder how bad the novel painted it.  The movies shows us mean, shallow little people with far too much money and prestige and really makes it look bad.  To me, that is a good thing!

And, although Andy surely doesn’t get what her friends are telling her, ultimately she rejects that mean, shallow world and returns being a more humble, real person. That’s a good thing, too.

Technically, the movie is well put together. The art direction and photography are superb and so is the editing.  The music is really terrific.

So, the more I thought about the movie, the more I began to like it, in spite of the extremely poor writing, stereotyped characters, predictable plot, and unbelievable action. I still wouldn’t recommend the movie to anyone, but there are some elements that help to redeem it.