An Education - Worth Seeing

Peter Sarsgaard is engaged to Maggie Gyllenhaal (degrees from a bunch of big-time schools, FHM's 58th hottest woman alive) who is the brother of Jake Gyllenhaal (friend of Lance Armstrong and Matthew Mcconaughey and star of a bunch of cult movies). Maggie and Jake are the children of Naomi Foner (couple of Oscars) and Steve Gyllenhaal (he has written an episode of Felicity). Their god-parents are Paul Newmann and Jamie Lee Curtis. In this movie, Sarsgaard plays the role of a dude that lives in a fantasy world. I would imagine that hanging around these aforementioned people would make it easy to play his role in this movie. Nonetheless, he was really freaking good.

Equally as tight as Sarsgaard, was Carey Mulligan. I'm debating on dating her or Princess Beatrice while I'm living in England. To belabor my boring interest with good actors, Alfred Molina and Emma Thompson were also great. I think Emma Thompson is one epic role short of being one of the greatest. I think she is as good as Meryl Streep and she doesn't carry the Hollywood obnoxiousness that Meryl Streep does. Which leads to thinking about British and American film. Which then leads to thinking about 'a country's' film.

It annoyed me how much people in the theatre were loving this movie towards the beginning. I felt like telling them that going to Oxford, appreciating art and music, Paris, and british puns are all really freaking annoying things and debatably racist, oppressive, and colonial. I think the reason I was annoyed is because I was being called out and I knew what was coming. I don't think the wealthy, indie-theatre supporters around me saw it coming. Had they seen it coming they might not have been chuckling and admiring the articulate, well versed, very London-british main characters. This script did a good job of making you think Paris is cool.

Turns out, in the end, we are all a bunch of frauds. People in Kensington still take shits. The British Museum is full of loot. Paris might be one of the most racially volatile cities in the world. Western Europe is not the center of the world. Going to Jazz concerts does not make you a philosopher. In contrast, learning, hanging out with your family, having some good friends, self-effacing, listening to people that know more than you, working hard at your job, being 'normal; is universal and therefore might be categorized as 'good'. The romanticism of engaging societal constructions with full blown desire to be 'better', in some way, is just that, romantic. Whereas, listening to your parents is not romantic but very real. This is not to say that by embracing humanity first we become less fraudulent. It just means that we recognize that the Eifel Tower does not define Paris--the people do. I think this would be the best thing to take from this movie.