This coming-of-age drama is, very roughly, the poor girl’s version of An Education. In that film, the teenaged, Oxford-aspiring heroine sees a romance with a man in his 30s (Peter Sarsgaard) as a way to escape her own dull life. Fifteen-year-old Mia isn’t dating the older man—her mom is—but if Sarsgaard’s character represents the lure of finer things to a middle-class girl, then Connor (Michael Fassbender) represents the lure of middle-class life to her. Katie Jarvis, a non-actress plucked from a train station in Essex, England, by writer-director Andrea Arnold, plays Mia with a minimum of artifice, and Arnold writes her as such. (The accents in the movie are not those of posh London and make some of the dialogue tough on American ears, although Fassbender at times sounds sort of American.)
Mia’s mother looks more like an older sister and acts more like a nasty roommate who drinks too much, but she’s presented more as a lousy parent than a villain. The housing project she and her two daughters live in seems tolerable. Still, Mia is an angry girl, and a loner, and Connor’s affability throws her at first. While the story becomes more provocative, Arnold avoids sensationalism. Her point is to show, not to shock. Mia won’t be going to Oxford, but she too winds up with an education.
IMDB link
viewed 2/20/2010 on pay-per-view ($7.99) and reviewed 2/21/2010
No comments:
Post a Comment