An Education is About How Patriarchy Makes Ambitious Women Vulnerable
The 2010 Academy Awards are probably best known as the year that The Hurt Locker became the first film directed by a woman to win Best Picture. It was also the first year, though, that two films by women were nominated for that award. Bigelow’s Hurt Locker got the glory. But Lone Scherfig’s An Education is the better film—not least because it elliptically addresses, with insight and bitterness, how and why it took till 2010 for a woman to win Best Picture in the first place.
Scherfig’s film, based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, is in some ways a male mid-life crisis movie like Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-nominated Lost in Translation. An Education, though, has a significantly bleaker view as to what those mid-life crises mean for women. The movie, set in London in 1961, features Jenny Mellor (Carey Mulligan) an intelligent 16-year-old schoolgirl. She wants to go to Oxford to study English and learn about art and music and the world her aggressively stodgy parents Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour) haven’t been able to show her.
Then she meets David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard) an urbane and knowledgeable man in his 30s, who flirts with her, charms her parents, and is soon escorting her to classical music concerts, and art auctions. Finally they go to Paris, where they sleep together on her 17th birthday. David proposes marriage, Jenny drops out of school—and then, inevitably, everything falls apart.
Most viewers will know immediately that David isn’t trustworthy; it’s no surprise to find out that a guy who grooms 16-year-olds is also a liar and a crook. The film isn’t about revealing David’s iniquity. It’s about showing, in methodical detail, how every single adult in Jenny’s life fails to help or protect her.
David’s friends, Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike), never tell Jenny that David is married—but they’re his friends, and more than a little sketchy themselves. More horrifying is the fact that Jenny’s parents are so easily bamboozled by this grown man pursuing their underage daughter. The headmistress of Jenny’s school, Miss Walters (played with cheerful malevolence by Emma Thompson) doesn’t help or offer advice, either, preferring to insult Jenny and bully her. Jenny’s favorite teacher, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) does tell Jenny she’s brilliant and should go on to school. But when Jenny makes a mean remark (as 17-year-olds do), Miss Stubbs, a full-grown woman, gets her feelings hurt, and gives up.
Everyone involved has culpability. But the overarching problem is patriarchy, and the way it limits the futures, and the presents, of teen girls. Jenny’s parents want her to have opportunities. But they’re so worried about propriety, and are so narrow-minded themselves, that they won’t let her explore on her own, not even to go to a classical music concert, much less a trip to Paris. They believe she needs a male escort and guide. David unscrupulously takes advantage of their naivete, but he also takes advantage of their sexism.
Jenny’s teachers, for their part, are supposed to educate their students about dancing, great books, music. But they also want to keep them from thinking, or from experiencing the world. When Jenny asks Miss Walters what careers might be available to a young woman graduating from Oxford, the headmistress says that Jenny might teach in a girl’s school—a profession that Jenny can see isn’t very fulfilling—or entering the civil service. Jenny is obviously passionate about the arts, but no one suggests she might someday have a career as a writer or musician. As Jenny exasperatedly puts it, “So, what you're telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and finally bored again, but this time for the rest of my life?”
No one can deny it, because it’s true. As per Betty Friedan, the adults in Jenny’s life are preparing her to study hard and then do nothing. Jenny’s parents shrug when she decides not to attend Oxford; why would she need to when she’s already found a man? Given her options, Jenny reasonably feels like the only path to a meaningful life is via a Prince Charming. David swoops in and turns her rotting pumpkin into a chariot—until the chariot turns out to be rotten too.
The film doesn’t end in misery. Jenny’s parents take responsibility for their role and support her rather than punishing her. With their backing and Miss Stubbs’ help, Jenny repeats her senior year, retakes her exams, gets into Oxford and is presumably able to access some of the opportunities for women that opened up as the 1960s progressed. Things, we know, have gotten better.
But how much better? Again, it took till 2010, a half-century after Jenny’s story is set, for a woman director to win Best Picture. Men still, in film, monopolize positions of power and influence. Women who want a meaningful life in the arts still have to negotiate with male patrons like producer Harvey Weinstein, who are often abusive and predatory.
Jenny learns from her experience with David that she has to rely on herself; if she wants the life of intellect and art and joy, she has to work at it. That’s a solid, middle-class moral. The film, though, has other takeaways. It suggests, for example, that the Oscars, and film, have shut women out for so long because there’s little support for women who are inspired by art and artmaking. And also because what support there is can be worse than none at all.