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Learning life lessons from a con artist

Parochial schoolgirl Jenny has it all: assiduous study habits, caustic wit and the clumsy elegance of a burgeoning woman.

Caught in Britain's post-World War II/pre-Beatlemania epoch

, Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is unaware of how bored she truly is.

In her rare and all too brief leisure time, she delays her homework, sprawls out on her bedroom floor and absorbs the scratches of a Juliette Greco record, fantasizing about a Parisian life so distant from her working-class upbringing in Twickenham. It's all too stuffy for a girl of literary aspirations. All that changes when she is approached by David (Peter Sarsgaard), a man in his early 30s who uses his cunning to court her and convince her straight-edge parents — a supportive Cara Seymour and very funny, overprotective Alfred Molina — that his presence will not distract her from her studies and admission to Oxford. To do so, David, a socialite, deceptively claims to have ties to eminent professors and scholars at the respected institution. David escorts the wide-eyed, humble schoolgirl to tuxedoed galas, classical concerts, dog races and spectacular jazz clubs. With every champagne glass downed, David expects his debutante to receive a healthy dose of education in his empirical "university of life." Trading in malfeasant intentions, screenwriter Nick Hornby (the novelist behind "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy") portrays David as an atypical con artist: gentle, caring and generous. He's too regal to be real. But the mysterious, inconsequential details surrounding his work and private life are what make the cosmopolite so alluring. David and Jenny are accompanied by his rich friends, Danny (Dominic Cooper), a man who prides himself as a collector of "things," and Helen (Rosamund Pike), an absentminded blonde bombshell. The couples have a strange rapport: Danny and Helen's carpe diem attitude and materialism are subtly juxtaposed with Jenny's intellectual awakening. Mulligan, a relative newcomer, is already drowning in accolades, and she deserves every bit of the attention received. Granted, Hornby has handed the girl a role as luminous as the City of Light itself. But Mulligan's ability to enrapture derives primarily from a screen presence untaught. Her natural gift imbues Jenny with so much more than the usual wild-child; she has prickly sophistication, moral doubt and indelible cuteness. We can't help but fall for her false self-assurance. When the blinding romance eventually comes to a screeching halt, Hornby pens an honest conclusion, making sure that everyone — David, Jenny's parents and Jenny herself — faces the harsh light of reality. Was David playing Jenny, or was she enticing him, shielding her better judgment to pursue life's ignorant glamour? The answers are left unclear. Espousing French sophistication, like the defiant films of Goddard, Resnais and Truffaut, the finale of "An Education" compacts Jenny's rite of passage into a tidy, truncated montage. The French would have been bolder, braver — they would have flipped the-powers-that-be a proverbial bird — but for the English, "An Education" is a great enough lesson.