Jenny, 16 and full of dreams, lies on the floor of her room listening to French singers and smoking French cigarettes. At school, she quotes the French existentialists, and tries very hard to tolerate the bumbling advances of the awkward boys who are understandably smitten by her looks, intellect and poise. (These scenes are very funny, as you might expect from a Nick Hornby script, no matter how grave the drama eventually gets).
Nearly everyone, in fact, is smitten by this gifted girl - her hovering parents (Alfred Molina), her starstruck friends, her most attentive teacher (Olivia Williams) who recognizes a once-in-a-lifetime prize pupil, someone with the brains and the good timing to go places she never could.
Then someone else falls for Jenny - a much older man named David (Peter Sarsgaard), who has a fancy car, money, modern taste and stylish friends (Dominic Cooper, Rosumund Pike).
He begins to date her, posing to her parents as an educational benefactor. Jenny is intoxicated, a little by the champagne, a lot by the glamour - art auctions, jazz clubs, even jaunts across the pond to Paris.
The viewer is not so much intoxicated as alarmed - this is a 16-year-old going off with a much older man, and not just any man, but Sarsgaard, one of the movie's great slippery characters - the sexual chameleon of "Kinsey," the simmering killer of "Boys Don't Cry." When he presses Jenny for a sexual relationship, it's hair-raising, in part because of his age, in part because of the way he infantilizes her.
The relationship raises many red flags, none of which seem to catch the attention of Jenny's parents. When she turns 17, they're as happy to see her married as they are to see her at Oxford. And razor-sharp Jenny is blind to his flaws, even when he admits to them.
