AN EDUCATION

I have been a fan of Lone Scherfig’s work since her Dogma 95 film Italian For Beginners (which I show to students when I teach Introduction to Film).  Likewise, I’ve enjoyed Nick Hornby’s novels and film adaptations (particularly About A Boy and High Fidelity).  With An Education, Hornby is adapting someone else’s work, a memoir by Lynn Barber, a British journalist, set in a London suburb in 1961.  The story is simple:  a precocious 16-year-old schoolgirl is seduced by an older man, with the unlikely complicity of her parents, and there are consequences none of them foresee.

The implications of the story are anything but simple, and I’ve seldom seen a more compelling argument for formal education presented in a movie.  The tricky part of the film, the unsavory part, is determining the effects of the other education the girl seeks and finds outside of the classroom.  Peter Saarsgard gives a wonderful performance as a man of about 30 who is both less and more than he appears.  We know from the outset that he is a predator, but we can also see how his charm causes people to overlook, at least for a time, what is right before their eyes.  The education this predator gives the schoolgirl is presented, ultimately, as something of a mixed bag, which will be a problem for some viewers but makes the film more complex.  An Education will give you a lot to think about as you watch it and more to consider after the credits have rolled.

A SERIOUS MAN

Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film, A Serious Man, is a 1960s retelling of the Job story.  The film is fascinating (as the Coens are wont to be) but not wholly satisfying.  The cultural context and cinematic detail throughout are rich, and the terrible things befalling our protagonist are also clever and, at times, slyly amusing, but it is that character who needs a bit – just a bit – more of a response to these events to draw the viewer more fully into the film.  Michael Stuhlbarg plays physics professor Larry Gopnik as an appealing but ineffectual man.  That’s okay so far as it goes, but I want more.  Probably I’m just looking for larger meaning where none is intended – and I do not expect the filmmakers to answer all of the great questions about human existence and theology – but it would be nice to have some clues about Larry’s interior life.  All of that aside, the film is still worth seeing.  Go and judge for yourself.

EVERYBODY’S FINE

Everybody’s Fine has a terrific cast (Robert DeNiro, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell, and Kate Beckinsale), but the movie cannot overcome its torturously contrived narrative structure.  I won’t knock it for some holiday clichés because those sometimes are worth repeating, but there is not any magic here.

THE ROAD

The Road (adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel) is grim.  Perhaps this is true to the post-apocalyptic story presented in the book of a man and his son traveling toward the coast and trying to stay alive amid storms and falling trees, roving bands of people who have resorted to cannibalism, and isolation against the endlessly gray landscape.  I can’t make the comparison because I have not read the novel (though I always argue books and movies are separate entities that should each stand alone).  I frequently appreciate bleak and desperate films because of the context they provide – the lessons about life and meaning.  I found none of that in The Road.  I do not feel enriched (even a painful way) or enlightened (even in a sad way) by seeing this film despite the fact that the production design is effective.