There’s something inherently romantic about traveling. It’s the chance to learn more about the world, step outside of your comfort zone, and see the things you only heard about before in books or movies. Meeting new people abroad also presents the possibility of finding new love. There’s a swoon-worthy subgenre of romantic films about finding love between tourist stops, like “Roman Holiday,” “Summertime,” “Before Sunrise,” or even my personal favorite from the cable era, “Only You.”
I had hoped “My Oxford Year” would fit into that time-tested escapist folder, but alas, the varnish wears off as the movie takes a serious turn. Directed by Iain Morris (“The Inbetweeners”), “My Oxford Year” follows Anna de la Vega (Sofia Carson), an eager grad student who has put her moneymaking career on hold to study Victorian poetry at Oxford University. She quickly makes an enemy with one of the dashing bachelors around town, Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest), who turns out to be her professor this semester (apparently the only one she has in grad school). The sparks fly almost intensely as their animosity, and by the time fall comes around, the grad student and the PhD-level teaching assistant are in each other’s arms. Although they agree to live in the moment and just enjoy their temporary fling, Jamie charms Anna (with a first-edition Edna St. Vincent Millay book, no less), but Anna worries Jamie hasn’t stopped seeing other women, especially Cecelia (Poppy Gilbert), who always appears close by whenever he’s not in class. Eventually, Anna must decide whether to commit to her relationship or return to her high-paying career in the States.
Based on the novel by Julia Whelan with screenwriting credits shared by Allison Burnett and Melissa Osborne, the film adaptation of “My Oxford Year” comes across as unremarkable YA fluff. It feels slight, and not in a way that sweeps you off your feet. The movie is cutesy and the characters are fresh off the cookie-cutter assembly line—like Anna’s pithy gay friend, her supportive girlfriend, a nerdy student who’s too obtuse to notice he has a crush, etc. If that’s the entertainment you’re seeking, then “My Oxford Year” is passable. Still, given the fantasy of a romance set in and around one of the world’s most famous universities and libraries, maybe my hopes got too high. Anna’s world seems underdeveloped, even for this kind of story. However, I appreciated the tension she faces as an American abroad and between her mother’s financial ambitions for her and Anna’s desire to pursue love and literature, a theme I wish could have been explored more, rather than being mostly sequestered into one awkward scene.
If you’re interested in avoiding spoilers, feel free to skip this paragraph, but I think I have to bring up why “My Oxford Year” loses its feel-good escapist sheen. You see, just as Anna’s falling deeply for her no-strings-attached partner, she learns the reason why he’s been so secretive lately is that he’s hiding a rare cancer diagnosis, with little chance for survival. The tonal shift from fantasy to tragedy casts a maudlin shadow over everything that follows. Essentially, from there on out, “My Oxford Year” becomes something of a gender-swapped “An Affair to Remember,” changing the course of one protagonist’s life while the other is relegated to bravely facing their diagnosis.
While Carson and Mylchreest are charming enough as our lovers among the library stacks, they don’t hit the emotional depths I would have liked to have seen in my traveling romance. Consider the magnetism between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in “Before Sunrise,” or the way that Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi stare into each other’s eyes knowing they can’t have what they truly want in “Summertime,” or even the comedic clashes between Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr.’s characters in “Only You.” That electricity is missing between our handsome leads, making the downbeat shift in the story feel even less tolerable.
While “My Oxford Year” makes for a very good advertisement for studying abroad, it leaves other things to be desired. The couple doesn’t quite light up the screen with their chemistry, and the writing feels much too basic, given these are meant to be characters in a literature degree program. Thankfully, there are moments of levity, a number of cross-cultural jokes, and supporting characters to lighten the mood. Still, the movie never quite recovers from deflating the possibilities of “what if” once the mid-way reveal gives us a prescribed ending. With nowhere else to go, “My Oxford Year” wears out its charm with a half-hearted end.
