‘My Oxford Year’ Is A PG ‘Saltburn’ With A Library Fetish

This is the part where I get to gloat and revel in my bragging rights, because a month ago, I predicted the plot of this entire film, correctly, just by watching the trailer.

But I can’t sit on my high horse for too long, as my girlfriend loves to remind me, because this ability says less about my clairvoyant powers, and more about the quality of the film, which I suspect has R. F. Kuang rolling over in her grave.

To clarify, the author of Babel, a scathing social commentary on colonialism set in a fantasy reimagining of 19th century Oxford, is very much alive and well, but I fully believe she has reserved/purchased a grave plot just for this purpose and it’s dramatic effect.

Because while My Oxford Year shares many of the cozy comforts and chummy friendships of Babel, there is no underlying message Sofia Carson’s Anna de la Vega, couldn’t have read in an undergraduate poetry class. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” and all that jazz.

Speaking of dramatic effect and grave plots, does this remind anyone of another movie that took place at Oxford?

Emerald Fennell’s ‘Eat The Rich’ thriller, Saltburn, was all anyone could talk about in the fall of 2023, and I suspect some Netflix executive took note and said, “How can we remake this as a slightly less cheesy version of a Hallmark movie?“, and thus, My Oxford Year was green lit.

Carson’s Anna and Barry Keoghan’s Oliver have more in common than you might realize. They are both outsiders from middle-class backgrounds, who make it to an elite institution like Oxford through their own academic abilities and intellect, where they must contend with snobbish brutes in poorly lit pubs, before “befriending” handsome aristocratic playboys, securing invites to their palatial ancestral homes, where they cozy up to the playboy’s parents, before watching him die and stepping into his shoes to fill his role.

Did I just blow your mind?

I mean, that’s how the movie ends, isn’t it? With Anna repeating Jamie’s first day of class monologue word-for-word, albeit unconvincingly (in this regard Carson feels like Netflix is chasing a cheaper version of Lily Collins, and it shows). We’ll get into the library fetish in just a bit, but I honestly thought Carson was more believable plodding through Moby Dick on a New York subway in The Life List than she was quoting poetry in this movie.

While we watch a montage of Jamie and Anna on the grand European tour they’ve been discussing throughout the film dissolve into the realization that Anna has taken the trip alone, after Jamie’s death, it’s not a cathartic enough moment to properly mourn his passing. There’s never a waterworks-worthy trigger for us as an audience, and nowhere near the kind of emotional resonance of a Me Before You.

Because My Oxford Year isn’t a movie about grief, and it doesn’t know how to handle the topic properly. We get a gratuitous scene where Anna wakes up to what appears to be Jamie’s lifeless body, but it turns out he just has pneumonia (and cancer still, obviously). When he actually dies, she just shows up to class, in a cute outfit that Emily Cooper would have approved of, to start her shiny new job, whose convenient vacancy she owes to her dead boyfriend.

If you think I’m being heartless, did you see the dad?

Beyond glossing over Jamie’s cancer, the film does us an ever larger disservice by skimming over the fallout between Jamie and his father, William Davenport. We know there’s bad blood between the two after the death of Jamie’s brother, Eddie, who succumbed to the same rare genetic cancer Jamie now suffers from.

While the movie implies that the riff between father and son is over a disagreement about whether Jamie should pursue further, or more experimental treatments, the heated scene between the two in the wine cellar, where William dashes a bottle of wine onto the stone floor, illustrates that their rupture is likely much more sinister than William’s stubborn reluctance to lose another son.

While the exact words are never spoken out loud, we can infer that the “words” which were “had” between the two likely implied that William wished Jamie had died instead of Eddie.

How do we know this? Because the two specifically discuss Eddie being William’s favorite child, and we know whatever was said was bad enough for Jamie to stop speaking with his father, which is why Anna’s attempt to reunite them before Jamie’s death, feels so insufficient. A model car and a night of drinking does not seem anywhere near enough to repair such a deep wound.

Jamie also never confronts Anna for colluding with his father, or inviting herself to his family home with the sole purpose of meddling in his family life. It all gets replaced with a diluted conflict over Anna’s inability to understand Jamie because she’s not “from here”, and his opposition to her decision to extend her stay at Oxford to spend his final days together.

It’s an unfulfilling alternative to Me Before You‘s struggle between wanting the person you love to live as long as possible, and respecting their personal wishes and health decisions.

But what about the books?

If you’re a bibliophile, or picked up an English minor in college, as I did, you’re still going to drool over this movie. The Oxford campus, classrooms, and library are all giving “light” academia, and still make for a visual and imaginative feast for the eyes. You can’t help wanting to be Anna, a more realistic and less cheesey version of her, that is. I mean, who gets an English degree to be a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs? The math isn’t mathing here.

But beyond Jamie’s tour of the library, where things start to get as hot as heavy as the ‘PG’ vibes will allow before the two move to…Jamie’s car (??? way to completely ruin every girl’s fantasy, Netflix), and his bellowing when Anna walks in on him receiving chemotherapy, that’s where the Beauty and the Beast vibes end, I’m afraid.

Watching these two talk about literature and quote poetry to each other might be the most cringe part of the entire film. Carson doesn’t have the gravitas of a Keira Knightley or a Saoirse Ronan to pull off a believably bookish character. Sincere passion is completely lacking, and we see through the paper-thin performance in an instant.

Carson’s desire to be, exactly what she is, a Netflix rom-com leading lady, seeps right through. We hear it in her husky voice, and see it in her perfectly polished hair, not a single split end in sight.

I’m sure the themes and the star power will be enough to draw high viewership numbers (Bridgerton fans will show up for Corey Mylchreest), and secure Carson yet another film with her prominent patron, but it seems the lightning in a bottle she caught with The Life List was just that. I thought we could take our queue from Fleetwood Mac, and hope it would strike “maybe once, maybe twice”, but alas, that wasn’t the case with this film.