Reviews are best taken with a sizable grain of salt, always bearing in mind the source. The review in Willamette Week, where I typically see films differently than that publication's reviewers, was the sum of what I knew about Danish director Lone Scherfig's An Education when I stepped into the Hollywood Theatre yesterday afternoon: a worldly older man seduces a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in 1961 London. An Education did not sound particularly appealing, but I was in the mood for a film and nothing else struck my fancy.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan, in a fine performance) is a very bright girl, sixteen, soon to be seventeen, who wants to attend Oxford, where she imagines she will read what she wants and say what she thinks, meet interesting people who engage in interesting conversation, watch foreign films, attend classical music concerts, and some day she will visit Paris. She is encouraged by her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), decent people who want the best for their daughter and see an Oxford education as her great chance for a life that will be better than theirs, though exactly what will constitute this better life and how an education will be the key to it is perhaps vague, more an article of faith than a clearly articulated vision.

For her part Jenny pursues her studies diligently, is the prize student at her school, and longs to escape the humdrum, bourgeois existence of the London suburb where her family lives. She reads Camus, smokes cigarettes, and goes on about existentialism with schoolgirl chums who do not really get it. She plays cello in the youth orchestra, casually drops French phrases into conversation, and listens to a prized recording of French chanteuse Juliette Gréco. Personable and likable, Jenny is not so much alienated as intellectually and culturally isolated, an island.

Our heroine's life takes a turn when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a man twice Jenny's age, offers her a ride home in his sporty car as she waits at a bus stop with her cello in the rain. David couples an aura of worldly sophistication with genial bonhomie to seduce Jenny and her parents. For Jenny he seems to offer an escape from isolation; her parents see promise of the security they looked to an Oxford education to bring with it. A man of some means, he takes Jenny to classical music concerts, dinner at nice restaurants, jazz clubs, and the dog track, and she is soon drawn in to a world far richer and more interesting than what she had known.

From the get-go something about David strikes us as not quite right, and not just the aspect of an older man preying on a schoolgirl. We soon find that he and his pal and partner Danny (Dominic Cooper) make their money through a variety of shady and some outright criminal dealings. That their sophistication, while not wholly a facade, is less than it first seems is exemplified by Danny's girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike), a ditz the antithesis of the kind of person Jenny dreams of meeting at Oxford.

It is wrenching to watch this young woman with so much going for her risk everything for a smooth-talking scoundrel who above all else is simply not good enough for her. Yes, David has some appreciation for the finer things in life and enjoys access to them, but that appreciation is dilettantish at best and perhaps more a tool for seduction than of substance. I found myself wanting to cry out to Jenny, "What are you doing with these people?"

There were moments when I thought that for the third consecutive weekend a film would leave me cold (500 Days of Summer and The Informant! being the others). I almost considered leaving the theater. Yet I stayed and was rewarded beyond anything I might have anticipated. Jenny is fortunate. She sees David for who he is before it is too late. There is someone to whom she can turn for help as her world comes crashing down around her and everything she worked for appears to be lost, and she has the capacity to realize this and the character to tell that person she needs her help.

An Education resonates for me as it does because I see so many bits of my own story reflected in Jenny's. As the autumn day turned to dusk, shadows gathering along streets lined with piles of damp leaves, I strolled home profoundly moved by the film's affirmation of values I hold dear, happy that things turned out as they did in Jenny's story, determined not to give up on my own.