Oscar 2010: Carey Mulligan's charm offensive
SalonAt one point in Lone Scherfig's "An Education" Carey Mulligan, as a 16-year-old schoolgirl whose yearning for culture and sophistication is being stroked by an older man, sits in a posh supper club flanked by this new beau and his two ultra-sophisticated friends. Mulligan's character, Jenny, is a bright girl bucking the constraints of her suburban upbringing; this is early '60s, pre-swinging London, an era when nice girls supposedly didn't. Jenny is hungry for the world, and that supper-club scene in "An Education" nails it: Sitting at the table with her new friends, her hair done up -- or, rather, undone -- in the nondescript center-part hairdo of schoolgirls everywhere, she's the teenage equivalent of a plane ready for takeoff. In that moment, as Mulligan plays her, Jenny isn't just a woman who's stopped waiting for things to happen, but an historian of the future: Before long, strange and wonderful things will happen to her country -- things like Jimi Hendrix, Ossie Clark, the Rolling Stones, not to mention the Beatles -- and they'll happen as a direct response to the boredom she's talking about.
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