An Education plot points are, somewhat glibly, discussed.
Writer-director Lynn Shelton’s Humpday has a hook that plays into that traditional suspicion women at least occasionally entertain of their significant male others: that they’re closer to their lifetime bros-by-choice than they should be. Shelton overplays things in that too-obvious manner typical to often unwatchable “mumblecore” movies: the camera jerks over under-lit images with the hope of real life in mind, supposed subtext is sounded like a gong, pregnant pauses are showily pregnant, and ad-libbed theoretically “truthful” dialogue is meaningless yet loaded to a fault, self-consciously telegraphing everyone’s intentions not to “telegraph”; it’s Cassavetes by way of America’s absurdly overrated The Office.
The gimmick is that two 30ish best buds, Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Josh Leonard) get drunk one night at a pretentiously open, tolerant party and mutually dare one another to screw each other for art porn that’s meant to transcend the usual exploitation and grotesqueries of porn. The idea is dumb and interesting in not quite equal measures, and the opening isn’t particularly promising, but the refreshing surprise of Humpday is that the sitcom stunt-sex angle is really misdirection into something more interesting: that casual gulf between friends who choose typically opposing methods of handling the insecurity that comes with middle-class privilege. Ben is the puffy guy, stable job, house, with wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore), with whom he now schedules functional sex in the hopes of reproducing. Ben billboards his guilt with his pleated slacks and wine and pasta-fed belly. Andrew has a (smaller) gut but it’s the gut of glamorous, righteous decay, complemented with the mountain man beard (that always looks merely unkempt on guys like Ben) and the artfully wrinkled, un-tucked plaid that always exudes more charisma than Ben’s ironed, fussed-over plaid. Andrew is the guy that randomly tells tales of fleeing to Mexico and who might show up to a party in a dashiki. Andrew’s the sort that threatens guys like Ben; that makes them feel even less sexy than they already feel, particularly with his just-a-shade-too-apparent “empathy” with and respect for guys like Ben. Few pictures acknowledge this division, insecurity and somewhat snobbery, and, for that, Humpday is, despite its ticks and mannerisms, likable and memorable.
Humpday also eventually reveals itself to be well-performed. Duplass is one of the more promising of the mumblecore writer/director/actors (parts of The Puffy Chair have welcome 20s-ennui perspective) and he neither condescends to nor sentimentalizes Ben. Ben is as self-deceiving as Andrew in a different direction, and Duplass has a way of wearing that uncertainty and fear on his cheeks (his extra weight has made him more expressive). Leonard, once of The Blair Witch Project, is one of the more dead-on embodiments of the condescending not-quite-English-majoring hitchhikers I’ve seen in the movies (and he looks almost exactly like one of my own intimidating hipster-wanderer acquaintances), and he has a final moment that is forgiving and rather beautiful.
That said, Shelton piles the homoerotic male backslapping on a bit thick; the point is fine if obvious, but most men are a touch more subtle while her men practically dry hump one another on the basketball court. This tendency points toward a bit of gay smugness – Shelton sometimes relishes the points she scores on the guys a little too much. The most telling moment, uncomfortable in a way that doesn’t quite serve the picture, is a near three-way between Andrew and an attractive lesbian couple (one of which is played by Shelton) where Andrew is intimidated and ultimately deflated by the ladies’ meant-to-be-taken-as-free-wheeling sexuality. The point is taken, but it’s delivered with a degree of superiority that doesn’t go down well, perhaps trading one clichéd dodge for another (it would be unimaginable for the women, particularly gay, to be frauds in this kind of picture). Perhaps the most sexually progressive movie possible now is a typical standard-issue romantic comedy in which a gay couple meets one another’s parents, loses the cat, and learns trite-ridiculous lessons of time with the family versus time at the office.
An Education is our yearly youth celebration movie congratulating a teenage hero for everything it uses to condemn the older characters. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is sixteen in early 1960s London, a sharp, chipper know-it-all who lords her blossoming affair with an older con artist (Peter Sarsgaard) over her friends. Education, at Oxford, a goal force fed to her by her parents, is Jenny’s potential escape from what she perceives as a life of being unappreciated, and – far more terrifying to a young, intelligent person – dull. Then; the con man presents another way out that’s more convenient, affording Jenny the power to tell her educators (including Olivia Williams and Emma Thompson) where they can stick their life of what she perceives as meaningless drudgery. That is until (inevitably) the con man turns out to be snowing Jenny as well, forcing her to embrace an education she doesn’t give the faintest hint of a damn about, apart from escaping her parents and achieving some form of concrete superiority over everyone else. Jenny concludes the film by telling us, the audience, that she intends to lie about her experience with the con man, implying a sort of do-over, because cute little smart little girls should always get what they want and shouldn’t be inconvenienced or uncomfortable in the slightest, teensiest way. Jenny’s parents are hypocrites for approving of Jenny’s potential marriage to the con man, while Jenny is washed of any part in the affair because she’s…well, because she’s the lead of the picture and because An Education, beneath the admittedly appealing gloss – it has pretty-good one liners courtesy novelist Nick Hornby and a nice atmosphere/pace courtesy director Lone Scherfig – is a hypocritical, elitist con itself.
