An Education, which hits theatres today, is either really lucky or really unlucky about its release date. Coming on the heels of the Roman Polanski arrest, which stirred discussion over whether sex with a minor is ever OK, the movie’s plot line is particularly fraught. An absolutely adorable Carey Mulligan plays Jenny, a 16-going-on-17-year-old student in 1961 England, who is courted by the much-older David, played by Peter Sarsgaard.

A piece about the film on ABC News today asks whether sex with a minor can be consensual, and pulls out a line Jenny’s teacher delivers to her, toward the end of the film: “You’re just a child.” It’s a line that screenwriter Nick Hornby now regrets, according to Mulligan, given the shadow the Polanski arrest has cast on the film. (Jenny and David do it, rather matter-of-factly, on her 17th birthday.)

But what was so powerful to me about An Education was how little you thought about the age difference between Jenny and David. She's legally a child, perhaps, but she fits in better intellectually and emotionally with David's crew than her peers. Her relationship with David was complex and totally messed up in a lot of ways, but age wasn’t the one that mattered—not to me, and not to any of the characters. For Jenny’s parents, it was enough that she be married and taken care of by a man with (bogus, as it turns out) hoity-toity academic credentials and money to spend on pampering their daughter—and, less nobly, them. For Jenny’s teachers, David was a threat solely based on how he’d affect her decisions about pursuing her own education. But that struggle between staying in school to work toward a meaningful career and letting herself be the darling accessory to her jet-setting man could just as easily have taken place were David a rich boy of her own age.

I saw a screening of the film before Polanski’s arrest had brought questions of statutory rape to the forefront of the news, so I wonder how seeing it now will color the way viewers judge Jenny and David’s relationship, particularly the sexual side. Will it still succeed in maintaining that Lolita-style distance that leaves you slightly skeeved out by how little you mind an older man is preying on a younger woman? Noreen and Willa, you saw it at the same time I did. Were you similarly un-skeeved?

Tags: movies, Rape

Sam, I was not particularly skeeved by the relationship between the 16-year old protagonist of An Education and her older man. I’m still not, even in light of Roman Polanski, but he does make me think a little harder about why I’m not skeeved. The central question, to me, seems to be one of precociousness: Is precociousness always a put on? Or is it possible that some precocious kids, while certainly not as worldly as they seem to be, are as mature as they seem to be?

I think An Education wants us to believe the latter: Jenny, for all of her schooling, is unschooled about many aspects of adult life (sex and culture being the two big ones), but her preternatural self-possession is not just a put on. The girl’s all there. (When Jenny fights with her elders, particularly her teachers, she is simultaneously bratty and asking searing, hard questions. She is never a trifle.) David, the older man, provides her with the life experiences (sex seems to be almost the least of these—the others being Paris, music, night clubs, heartbreak) to match her precocity. An Education argues that a precocious girl who gains life experience becomes, in fact, a woman. I found this, at least in the specific case of the movie, to be persuasive.

The problem is just that the “life experiences,” in this film, come at no great price. Jenny is almost ruined, but she is not. Her path to Oxford took an enriching detour—it was not derailed. And this, well, lucky break allows us to overlook the flaw in Jenny’s precocity: However clever, well read, hard-working, and charming she is, she is also a hideous judge of character. David is a cad.

The movie makes a very simple move to make this flaw, the ultimate proof that Jenny really is a child, seem irrelevant: It makes all the adults having to do with the film, both Jenny’s parents and the audience, equally hideous at judging. Her parents are as taken with David as Jenny is. Jenny's falling for a charming, thieving, cheating liar is not a youthful mistake because it could just as easily have been an adult one. And if the audience is never quite as charmed by him, we are so taken with Jenny, with her intelligence and spunk, that we stop sizing up her mistakes. I think it's a credit to An Education that I wasn't skeeved. It didn't want me to be. But, if this movie were real life, I'd like to think I would be.

Tags: An Education, movies, Rape

Willa, it’s funny that you view the Jenny-David relationship in An Education as unskeevy because she’s precocious. When I tried to understand why I wasn’t bothered by the 16-year-old dating a man twice her age, I came away with sort of the opposite answer.

This is one of those things I’ve tried to float in conversation before and it always ends with people silently avoiding eye contact (for the shy ones) or telling me I’m a perv (for the more outgoing), but I’ll try again: I kind of like the idea of the older, knowledgeable tutor type sleeping with his young, eager acolyte. When I learned in college about the relationships men like Socrates had with their attractive young male followers, I had a sense of—what? Nostalgia? It’s not envy; I certainly don’t want to sleep with every man who can teach me something. But I envy the relationship those Greeks had, back when terms like “statutory rape” didn’t exist. It strikes me as so perfectly symbiotic: The beautiful blank slate of a student takes knowledge from his wise and wizened mentor, and in exchange gives the joy of fresh enthusiasm. And sex. I won’t be so flip as to ask “What’s wrong with that?” (Obviously, there are many unpleasant examples of the Socrates figure taking advantage of someone vulnerable and non-consenting.) But I will say that, in its idealized form, doesn’t that sound kind of nice?

Tags: An Education, movies, Rape