An Education

Character driven movies have been my favorite, lately. An Education is one of those. There's the beautiful, smart teenager, the controlling idiot father, the easily manipulated mother and the suave, mysterious older man. On top of the interesting characters there are the subtle layers of character, values, the stupidity of innocence and redemption.
Jenny, the beautiful, intelligent teenager from a boring suburb of London contains enough "bad girl" in her to allow her values to be compromised when it comes to the worldly David. She, along with her father and mother are swept into his scheme in mere moments. Cunning and charm are his calling cards. He's so good at it, you know you should scream at Jenny, "run, run," but can't. He's got you in his cross hairs, the audience who spent the money to sit in that theater wanting to be carried away, and you are. I was.
She watches for a moment as her mother tries to clean a casserole dish and dreads her fate if she doesn't break free. She has a chance to be Audrey Hepburn in Paris, intoxicated by jazz and French and wine and laughter and food. Formal education isn't worth the time or hard effort when all it will bring is more boredom, tediousness and a bland slate of hard work.
I had to suspend belief slightly when it came to a brilliantly aware offspring of an oafish father. How did she become so socially acute while her father is stuck in a dreary world of money worries and a home-bound mentality? I'm a believer that the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree. But his limitations and dim witted philosophies actually do add to the layers of human behavior that intrigue me.
He swears he and his wife had an interesting life before they had Jenny. But I doubt it. His desires to have a daughter in Oxford without having to pay for it help propel Jenny down her dangerous path.
British films take me a while to understand the words with the accents, but once I'm ensconced in the verisimilitude, I'm a happy movie goer.