Poetry is one of the many proofs that God works through our minds to give a window unto the soul.  Perhaps not every line ever written in this manner is intended with such depth, but when it emotionally moves you, I am not sure any other explanation suffices.  It is particularly poignant when it comes to death.  In such moments, we turn to words of comfort.  The Bible is a great source for such succor.  Unfortunately, a lot of people do not turn to Scripture as a Catholic like me might like.  What is even better is when the two feed off each other to create the syllabic art that is meter and rhyme.  With today’s film, My Oxford Year, there is much of what has already been discussed.  It has the added bonus of being set at one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world, the eponymous university.  What could go wrong?

Seemingly nothing can go wrong to Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson) in the days leading up to what she will eventually call My Oxford Year.  She already holds a graduate degree in finance from an ivy league school in the United States, and has a job waiting for her at Goldman Sachs.  Before taking this august position, she has decided to follow a dream of hers to study poetry at Oxford for the title amount of time.  Her parents are excited for her, her mother (Romina Cocca) proudly proclaiming that people with a degree from the English school earn more money.  Aside from the financial gain, Anna has a list of stereotypically English things she wants to do while she is in that country.  After she gets settled in her apartment over there, she goes out to check off one of those items: getting fish and chips.  On the way, she is splashed by a driver in a vintage Jaguar, an inauspicious beginning to her stay.  As she is waiting in the shop for her food, another customer walks in to place an order.  He soon begins behaving oddly, ducking in order to avoid a woman he sees across the street with whom he had been intimate.  Because he is also the owner of the vehicle that drenched her, Anna signals the jilted lover and indicates that the man himself is inside.  The following day is her first day of class, and Anna is especially excited because it is with the person she has come all this way to study with: Professor Styan (Barunka O’Shaughnessy).  Professor Styan walks in, announces that she has been given a loftier position and that she will not be teaching, and she is promptly replaced by Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest).  If you know academia, this is not a strange occurrence when you consider he is Professor Styan’s Ph.D. (DPhil over there) student.  I filled a similar role when I was at Loyola.  For Anna, not only is she unprepared for the change, she is shocked to find that it is the person she encountered yesterday in the fish and chips shop.  Still, he has come to the lecture with an offering of cake, and after a poetry laced battle of wills, she accedes to his unintended apology.  Later, Anna accepts an invitation from her new classmates to have that English rite of passage that is going to the pub.  While there, she is harassed by another student, who makes the ridiculous claim that she is only at the school to fulfill a quota.  She storms out, but is followed by Jamie, who happens to be at the same establishment.  Though she is hesitant at first, she accepts his offer to walk her home.  Instead of going straight there, they spend the evening at a karaoke bar and eating kababs.  Such is the bond developing between them that they kiss at her door, but nothing further happens.  She is mystified by this behavior, but carries on with her life.  The next time they see each other socially is at Halloween.  She is nearly the only one to put on a costume for the occasion, and she spends the night dancing with another guy to make him jealous.  That is not exactly Christian behavior, but it does get her noticed.  To make it up to her for being misled in any way, he takes her to a special section of the Bodleian Library where he shows her a first printing of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work.  The gesture is enough to take their relationship into a more physical realm.  In the aftermath, he makes her promise that they are just having fun and not going to get serious.  She agrees, thinking of her eventual move back to New York.  Yet, the more time they spend with each other, the more they fall in love.  When he does not show up for the Spring boat race against Cambridge, she goes to his place to find whether she is being played like his other lovers.  That is when she learns the awful truth about him: he is suffering from terminal cancer and does not have long to live.  It is something that his late brother also died from, and the woman with whom he has been seen, Cecelia Knowles (Poppy Gilbert), was his brother’s girlfriend.  Unlike his brother, Jamie does not intend to spend the rest of his life in a hospital undergoing treatment.  The fact that he will not submit to medicine is a point of contention between him and his father, William Davenport (Dougray Scott).  Despite all this, Anna will not let him suffer alone, and they continue to date.  Jamie eventually introduces her to William and his mother, Antonia Davenport (Catherine McCormack), and they are charmed by Anna.  Unfortunately, Jamie’s condition takes a bad turn, and he is taken to the hospital.  William hopes that Anna will help convince Jamie to continue to fight the disease, which she sort of tries.  All the same, she is invited back to their family estate for her birthday.  During the celebration, she tells her mom that she wants to stay in England, but Jamie tells Anna that she is crazy.  Once more, their relationship cools, prompting her to again insist that she wants to spend whatever days he has left with him.  They have one last intimate night together before he has to go back to the hospital.  When the doctors consult his parents, William indicates that Jamie wanted to simply let the cancer take its natural course, a sign of the repairing of their relationship.  Jamie leaves the hospital one last time, dying in Anna’s arms as they talk about their long dreamed of European tour.  The film ends with her taking Jamie’s place the following term teaching the poetry course.

You can see in Anna teaching the class at the end of My Oxford Year a sort of poetry in that there is a rhyming to these developments.  Speaking of developments, you might think the natural Catholic place to go with this review would be the manner in which Jamie dies.  After all, Catholics believe in the sanctity of life.  Therefore, it would follow that the logical course of action would be to use every means necessary to stay alive as long as possible.  In this manner, it would seem that Jamie is not only speeding up his death, but seeking to avoid suffering.  He did say that his intention was not to go through what his brother endured.  God is close to people in such struggles.  Would it not then be harsh, but fair, to say that Jamie is chickening out?  The obvious answer is no, and there is a Catholic reason for saying so.  The Church does not say that everyone faced with a terminal disease must do everything possible to slow its progression.  Besides, to be approaching so sure of a death is a suffering onto itself.  What Catholicism does not condone is ending one’s life before its natural termination, be that by disease or old age.  It does seem cruel that one like Jamie should pass at such a young age.  He is not the first to experience such a trauma, and he will sadly not be the last.  What we get too focused on, and the film discusses this topic, is the tragedy of a youthful demise.  Instead, it reminds us, and Faith backs up this point, that it is what we do while we are alive that matters, with however many years with which God blesses us.  In this way, Anna is doing something remarkable for Jamie, what the Church would call a corporal act of mercy, in this case visiting the sick.  It and the six others are tangible ways of reflecting God’s love for others.  We need more of that, and people like Anna, in this world.

Then again, I hope that not everyone behaves like Anna and Jamie in My Oxford Year.  Specifically, I am referring to their pre-marital promiscuous.  It is sad that he passes away, but that is not a free pass to behave how he wants.  As is discussed a number of times in this movie and in the previous paragraph, what we do in this life matters, particularly to God.  Thankfully, none of the scenes are too steamy, and overall it is a pretty touching film.