An Education

I’m not going to write the standard New Years Day post.  It’s not my style.  I’m not always going to write about movies.  But I will again today.  Vacation continues and we are going to the movies a lot this week.  Also, since Congress is not in session, all is quiet on the political front.  It won’t always be quiet and neither will I.

Steve and I spent New Years Eve in our traditional manner.  A double feature and dinner at an Indian Restaurant.  We are blessed with several really good Indian places in Greensboro.  This year we went to Saffron and it’s probably the best.

We also saw two very good films– one of which was really great.  We saw both “An Education” and “Me and Orson Welles.”

“An Education” was first and is one of the best films I’ve seen this year or any year.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.  It was a perfect gem of a film.  Beautifully written, acted and directed.  Perfect art direction as well.  The film is set in 1962 and relates to the “education”, in both school and life, of a 16/17-year-old girl in England.  Carey Mulligan was amazing in the lead.  Peter Sarsgaard was also wonderful, but he is so natural his performances are frequently overlooked.  Great supporting performances also by Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper.

I won’t spoil the plot, but I will say it did make me think about how things have improved for women over the last 47  years.  In the film, the main questions are “what is the value of education for women?” and “is it worth it?”  The heroine learns the answer in the course of the film through both her “education” in life and in school.  She questions the value of a woman’s education at that time as it was really seen, even by her father, as only useful to get a “Mrs. Degree”.   Even her teachers advised her, outside of marriage, the only options for an Oxford educated woman  were teaching or, perhaps, civil service or a secretarial job.  She questioned whether it was worth all the effort when one could get the “benefits” of a post collegiate life, a good marriage to a man who would take care of her, without the education.  Her question was what is the value of education outside of this context?  Was she just wasting her time?  As someone who graduated from a Liberal Arts college, I’m very happy with her ultimate realization.

The film also took me back to the time and place when I was young and looking trying to figure out how to learn to live the life I wanted.   How do you escape your little world to find the larger world you want to be a part of?  The answer is:  You take chances on new things and new people.  You make mistakes and you learn.  Everything is new and the future appears unlimited.  You are young enough to recover from most of your mistakes.  Please make every effort to see this film.  A lot more happens that I won’t go into.  It really is an amazing multi-layered film with wonderful multi-layered performances.  It is nothing short of perfection.

“Me and Orson Welles” is also a very enjoyable film, however not without its flaws.  The performances by Zac Efron, Claire Danes, Ben Chaplin and most especially Christian McKay, as Orson Welles, were excellent.  The art direction and clothes/hairstyles do not ring true to the period.  The script is flawed.  However, the film captures the period and every theatre buff should see it for the “inside” look at Welles’ famous production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” that launched the Mercury Theatre.

The connection to “An Education” that jumped out at me was, again, how things have, hopefully, changed for women.  In this film, all the women were more or less at the mercy of the men.  The men treated them as second class sex objects.  The only way the women could get ahead was by sleeping with and manipulating the right man.  Sex was either a means for advancement or a recreation- depending on your sex.

The one other thing that amazed me was that in both films the protagonists were 16 and 17 years old.  These kids took big chances.  They made mistakes.  And they learned about life.  With few exceptions, I don’t see kids of that age embracing life and taking the big chances anymore.  They- and society- today seem to still view people this age as children who must be protected.

I’m starting to wonder if puberty now begins at 30.  This is something else I’ll need to think about and write about more in the future….