This is high season for sexual censoriousness. Facts are in short supply, but conclusions are abundant. We do know that David Letterman has allegedly been the victim of a crime involving affairs with members of his staff. We don’t know whether Letterman was married at the time of any of these events (as if it was any of our business), or if they may have involved acts of sexual harassment. Still, on Morning Joe today, Mika Brzezinski, the Red Queen of public affairs commentary (“Sentence first–verdict afterwards”) did not let a lack of facts keep her from condemning Letterman for “hypocrisy,” as he put it, for joking about Bill Clinton and other public figures whose sex lives became public fodder. Thus she ended the week with same tone of indignation that she began it when she, along with many others, declared Roman Polanski “guilty of rape” and “being a pedophile,” as well as lesser charges of being artistic, being foreign, being European, living in France, and having friends in Hollywood. Polanski may very well indeed be guilty of rape, but that’s something that a jury gets to decide after a fair trial in a court of law. It’s as though the word “allegedly” no longer existed, as though “innocent until proven guilty” was one of those niceties advised to children that adults feel free to ignore.
Now, into this raging storm of censoriousness arrives An Education, a movie that has already been touted as one of the year’s best. The film, which opens October 16th, is about a teenage girl’s romantic relationship with an older man, and—here’s what’s provocative—does not rush to condemn it.
Based on a memoir by the English journalist Lynn Barber, directed by Lone Scherfig, written
by Nick Hornby, and featuring a brilliant, career-making performance by Carey Mulligan, An Education is set in the early sixties, in a suburb of London. Sixteen year-old Jenny, too intelligent for the confining middle-class life she is temporarily mired, dreaming of the day when she can join a smokier, jazzier, more francophonic world, one day meets David, a man nearly twice her age. The assured and sophisticated David (excellently played by a debonair Peter Sarsgaard) offers the most romantic gesture possible: he takes an interest in her, a genuine interest in who she is and what she wants. And while he woos Jenny by giving her access to art and music and eventually Paris, he also woos her parents, offering them a combination of a suitor’s respect and a peer’s recognition. And even though Jenny eventually sees that David supports his splendid lifestyle with a web of shady of not criminal enterprises, she turns her back on her the dull, earnest school teachers who have supported her efforts to get accepted into Oxford, and accepts David proposal of marriage.
What’s remarkable about the film—and what may leave it susceptible to condemnation by the Mika Brzezinskis of the world—is that David is never portrayed as exploiting Jenny. We may not 
end up trusting David very much, but we never really dislike him, and we never feel has mistreated Jenny. Instead, he is shown to be solicitous of desires and patient with her feelings. His sexual interest is part and parcel of the emotional and intellectual connection he feels with her. This is strikingly different from the way in which the movies, particularly Hollywood movies, portray adult male sexuality, as something dangerous, or destabilizing, or laughable, and which must usually be walled off in marriage or buried in widowhood if a protagonist is to be accepted. Very few male characters are allowed the latitude enjoyed by, say, Diane Lane in most of her films, or by the Sex and the City women. James Bond, once the exemplar of the predatory male, has been on a short leash since the dawn of the Timothy Dalton era. Indeed, one of the attractions of Mad Men is seeing what has become a piece of forbidden fruit: men at the height of their masculine power taking a sexual interest in women.
The complicated nature of Jenny and David’s relationship is summed up by the unspoken implication of the film’s title. Jenny received an education from David, a tutorial in things nice and not so nice, from which she profited. It’s an unsentimental view of the way romantic relationships often work, and the climate for its discussion has suddenly turned cold.