An Education / Marked by two superlative performances–by Peter Sarsgaard and Carey Mulligan–the Brit indie An Education, based on a memoir Lynn Barber and with a Nick Hornby screenplay, is one of the best movies of the year–for sophisticated audiences only.

This movie knows exactly what it’s doing in telling its archetypal story of a precocious 16-year-old schoolgirl (Mulligan, wonderful) seduced, in every possible way, by a man in his mid-30s (Sarsgaard in his best performance since The Dying Gaul).

Yes, yes, yes. I know: you’ve seen it all before. But maybe not this way–not by brilliant Danish helmer Lone Scherfig, a lady aware of certain emotional essences usually left out of this kind of cautionary tale. It’s l962, London, but this is a timeless story so that date is only factual, not particularly relevant unless this marks the seminal point for swingin’ ’60s England.

Stifled by an almost airless homelife (self-divided father, anhedonic mother), a rigid private prep school designed to turn out “successes,” Jenny, eager to breathe freer, to taste the good life outside Twickenham and her repressed teachers, is inexperienced, but that is her point, exactly. She yearns for more and she gets it, in spades.

Enter one David Goldman (Sarsgaard, with a perfect Brit accent, not overdone)–a man of great charm, wit, and genuine love of fun–who treats Jenny like a completely-realized person. He proves to be a hustler (liar, swindler, thief), which Sarsgaard reveals slowly and skillfully. But this actor’s hustler is not the movieland kind: he takes genuine delight in Jenny–of a kind. But you’d be right if you noted when you see this film (and you should) that there’s an oddness in Sarsgaard’s characterization. In some ways, it’s as if it’s his first affair (at first, non-sexual), too, as if Jenny does indeed light up his existence.

Perhaps too subtly for our recent Hollywood experience, the actor is after big game here. Almost any decent actor can play a charming hustler; Sarsgaard goes for essence, and achieves it. He goes to the soul of archetypal trickster David Goldman, revealing his tortured heart, condemned to constant deception, anguished and unable to stop. There’s pain in Goldman’s sincere smiles, grief in his face when he’s in “repose.”

As Jenny’s father–rage-filled but vulnerable–Alfred Molina will get an Oscar nom for his performance here, as will Mulligan. Or, failing that, they both will get Golden Globe nods, since the foreign press is now more sophisticated. Thank God for the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr and the New Yorker’s David Denby, both first-rate film critics, as opposed to reviewers.

Jenny is no paragon of perception: she is intoxicated by the rarefied air of (apparently) easy money, swank night clubs, almost terminally-sophisticated banter, rides in a maroon sports car and a lover seemingly willing to wait until she’s l7 before sexuality completes the picture.

The tone of this movie is well-nigh perfect: It isn’t heavy-handed, isn’t melodramatic, isn’t solemn. It is, in fact, full of laughs and chuckles of deep-recognition on the part of the audience. Speaking of whom: people gathered for the 11:20am showing last weekend stayed to read final credits.

This one won’t dissolve from your mind before you leave the theater complex. An Education will restore faith in movie storytelling.

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