An Education (Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard) DVD Review

Paramount Home Entertainment / Region 4 / Released April 2, 2010

AN EDUCATION is released this month on DVD, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber and adapted for the screen by Nick Hornby it stars Carey Mulligan as schoolgirl Jenny Mellor who in the early 1960’s is swept into an affair with an older Jewish man played by Peter Sarsgaard. Co-starring the likes of Emma Thomson, Rosamund Pike and Alfred Molina, it’s a gorgeously evocative look at British life at a time before the permissive era had set in.

Jenny is 16 and feeling more than a little stifled by what she considers to be the constrains of her life, still treated like a child by those around her when she really just wants to embrace womanhood. When she meets the thirty something David she is swept off her feet, he even manages to persuade her parents (the fab Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) that he is the man for their daughter. Introduced to a whole new social spectrum Jenny very much has her eyes opened but is the relationship getting in the way of her dreams of Oxford University.

A wonderful, many layered film, one that is going to be one of those landmark British films that stand the test of time, An Education is definitely not to be missed.