Peter Sarsgaard plays a character with a learning curve in ‘An Education’
Set in the dreary days between postwar and swingin’ London, “An Education” is the story of Jenny, a teenager with a bright future (played by an actress with a bright future, 24-year-old Carey Mulligan) who falls in love with David, a suave stranger twice her age. It starts with the offer of a ride home in the rain and, through his considerable charm, moves on to visits to art auctions and fancy restaurants and weekend trips. But is his alluring sincerity just the mask of a serial seducer? For Peter Sarsgaard, the actor who plays David, it’s not that simple. David, he says, believes he’s opening the world up to her and has no intention of causing anyone pain, least of all young Jenny.
David is part con man, part seducer of young girls.
For me playing David, I never imagined there were other girls or anything like that. Not that there hadn’t been, either. He wasn’t a serial anything. Everything he was doing with her, he was experiencing for the first time. She was bringing things out in him that felt real. Someone asked me, “How come when you’re picking her up at school . . . you’re not looking around to see if anybody’s watching you?” Because I’m not doing anything that I’m ashamed of. I believe that I’m showing a young girl the world and taking her to see a concert. “Oh, you like art? I’ll take you to an auction.” It’s not any more complicated than that. He’s in a state of discovery with her.
He’s getting to be 15 again. When he was 15, which was in the late ‘40s and he was Jewish -- you start doing some of the math and figuring out what England was like during that time . . . He’s waking up to something in his life, and unfortunately he goes about it all the wrong way and ends up, hopefully, realizing that he’s unhappy. That would be the best thing you could hope for him. People say, “Did he learn something?” like he was bad. It’s not that he was bad. It’s that he was disconnected from the fact he was unhappy, and that’s a dangerous state. Was there a particularly revealing scene in that regard?
One of my favorite moments -- and it shows more about him than we normally see -- is when Jenny tells my friends that I’ve proposed to her. I’m sitting on the sofa and I have a reaction there. It’s a subtle thing. I think it says a lot. I make a noise, like, “Yeeaaahh. . . .” I’m suddenly not completely able to disassociate. There’s an obvious anxiety somewhere in there, creeping around. The way that a man’s mind can work sometimes. “Oh, God, I have really got myself into a situation.” But then Jenny says something funny and it actually goes away from his conscious mind. It’s how a guy in that situation doesn’t seem malevolent to me, because he’s lying to himself as much as he’s lying to anyone else. There is the element too of bridging the ‘50s and ‘60s -- how did the period inform your character?
[Just that] this idea in the ‘60s that people were breaking down rules. He’s trying to find ways to be happy in his life. I think that’s what drove everyone into the ‘60s; the repression of the ‘50s. Eating the same bad food every day and not enjoying things. My dad was in Mississippi during the ‘60s, and he talks about tasting good beer for the first time, a German beer that his German teacher in college brought. He said he loved it so much that he drank, like, a 12-pack and . . . threw up in somebody’s car. . . . It’s those little luxuries that just make people go, “Aahhhh. Maybe I don’t need to settle for being unhappy.” This film is so different from your earlier work “Elegy.”
What this movie has going for it is that it’s really positive. [“Elegy”] was tougher in that its lead character had elements of being a misanthrope. He was not buoyant. And buoyancy sells every time. People who like art films might watch [“An Education”] and go, “Shoot her!” Well, there are dark moments in “An Education.”
Exactly, and that’s what makes it better. But if you watch the trailer, they sell that [buoyancy]. I guess I’m saying to the art house crowd, “Go see it. It’s not all girls giggling on bicycles.”
