Truly, An Education wasn’t what I expected it would be going in.
To be fair, it was probably my fault. Concerned about sexual content, I looked it up on some family-oriented movie review sites. The kind of sites that warn parents about inappropriate material in films, and tell you which to stay far away from.
This particular website described An Education as pretty terrible. In not so many words, it said that the film was about a young girl being seduced by an older man who wanted to have sex with her. It said that the majority of the film surrounded this attempt, by the older man, to get the younger girl to have intercourse with him. It said that that was essentially the point of the film. I had my own reservations as well. Having recently seen Crazy Heart, I was still smarting from the classic Hollywood older man is swooned by much younger woman fantasy that that film let play out. An Education seemed like it would be much the same. But, as I’d find out, it wasn’t all about sex and it wasn’t just that same old Hollywood story.
