An Education

I’ve forgotten how the 2009 movie An Education wound up in my Netflix queue (although Steve mentioned it briefly), but as I watched it I thought to myself, “Wow, this story is really familiar.”  As it turns out, I was right.

It’s interesting to contrast the movie with Lynn Barber’s memoir.  David/Simon Goldman, as played by Peter Sarsgaard, cleans up much better than I had pictured his real-life counterpart, and a lot (but not all) of the really creepy bits from the Guardian article are missing.  This allows the movie to begin as a standard-issue coming-of-age story.

Noteworthy is that the movie doesn’t attempt to hide the Jewish background of David and his confederates, but I’m not sure how significant this is.  Certainly in America, lots of different ethnic groups passed through an organized crime phase before evolving beyond it.  It’s hard to imagine many Jews today engaging in the kind of petty thievery and blockbusting that we see portrayed in 1960s England.

The movie brings the life the extent to which David was able to use class intimidation to persuade Lynn's reluctant parents to trust him with the care of their sixteen-year-old daughter.  Astute observers will pick up on subtle indicators that Lynn's family is lower-middle-class (back when such a thing existed), whereas David presents himself as Oxford educated, the very ambition that they have for Lynn.  But they don't seem to have much in the way of expectation that their daughter should remain chaste once they fall for David's act.  Lynn is clever and studious, but finds the endless study of Latin quite boring compared to the life of travel and nightclubs that David appears to offer her.  She has a couple of arguments with her teachers, who urge her to stay on the Oxford track, challenging them to make such a life compelling.