What 'My Oxford Year' Teaches About the Value of Life

by Lauren Boyer

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*Spoilers Alert* I must admit I had no idea what I was in for when I sat down to watch My Oxford Year. I thought it would be cheesy and well-acted. Neither assumption was particularly the case. But what My Oxford Year loses in—I’m sad to say—Sophia Carson’s character’s stiffness (blame the actor or the writer), it makes up for with its storyline. 

The film centers around Ana (Sophia Carson), a hard working American eager to give herself a taste of Oxford before starting her promising Wall Street job. As she struggles to adjust to British life, she has a series of encounters with her T.A., Jamie, that quickly turn romantic before she learns he’s been diagnosed with a deadly illness. 

My Oxford Year gives its audience something different when walking the line between killing and letting die. It manages to simultaneously value life while giving agency to those in pain. 

Many will say that euthanasia values the life of its victims. I say it only values their painless life. The act does not see life as something so sacred, so priceless that it is to be protected at all costs—even from oneself. In fact, it starts its proponents down the slippery slope of determining whose life is worth living. An example of this gone wrong might be questioning whether all people past a certain age must be in a degree of pain that makes their lives not worth living and then legalizing this assumption. 

If someone is suicidal, they are seen as unwell and in need of social protection. No one is suicidal because they lack pain. It is our place as a society to protect these people even when it seems like there is no hope ahead. We don’t always know what’s best for ourselves, but we do know that survival is one of our greatest instincts as a species and as organisms. To reject that fact is an unnatural sign that requires help, not passivity or enablement.

So how does euthanasia relate to My Oxford Year? Here’s a spoiler. Jamie dies. It’s a real tear-jerker. But it’s different from the deaths by euthanasia we witness in Me Before You and The Thursday Murder Club. Let me explain. Jamie’s fight isn’t to end his hopeless and painful future. Jamie has no future. The message is quite the opposite. 

There is a line in the film—“We don’t get to choose our circumstances, but we do get to choose how we respond to them.”

To set the stage more clearly, I’d like to emphasize that Jamie is dying from the beginning of the film from the same disease that previously took his brother’s life. He witnessed his brother fight for his life with all of their family’s emotional and financial resources. Jamie saw an unnatural, medicalized, hospital-bed death after a physical and emotional roller coaster of medical experimentation and he decided that death is inevitable (a reasonable assumption) and that more experimentation is not how he would like to follow his brother. 

Jamie’s choice to pursue very limited treatment and pretty much reject a medicalized death is the opposite of euthanasia. He is not turning to “medical treatment” to remove his problems. He is taking a stand at making every terrible, difficult moment he has left count. 

The trouble comes when his father perceives his choice not to fight as selfish suicide. Choosing how to die is not the same as taking one’s life. Choosing to die a natural death instead of a medicalized one is different from rushing death in response to a painful but not terminal diagnosis. 

In fact, one of the movie’s greatest tensions isn't found in its romance (though the film is listed as a romantic comedy—misleading, right?) but in Jamie’s relationship with his father. Anna’s role as Jamie’s lover isn’t to support his suicide but to bridge the gap of trauma and misunderstanding between Jamie and his father. I would even argue this is the film’s greatest tension because it’s what the climax hinges on. 

Just as Jamie chooses to live his life as he suggests one should live poetry, experiencing it fully instead of contemplating the emotion within, Anna is inspired by him. She continues their relationship with her eyes wide open and, despite being fully aware of how Cecelia—Jamie’s brother’s lover—remains haunted and changed by the tragedy of his death, Anna decides to get closer to Jamie and live what time they have together to its fullest, a decision which changes her life forever as at the film’s end she takes his place at Oxford instead of pursuing her prior dreams. Why? Because she sees he is right. Life is meant to be lived, no matter how painful and messy it gets, and Anna decides to live it and inspire others to do so just as Jamie once did. 

So, cry all you want as Jamie dies onscreen but be thankful that the pain inflicted on you by this film’s writer serves a greater purpose than to encourage us to give in to the pain and apparent hopelessness of life. Life can always become more meaningful. True empathy lies in the protection of those in pain, not the enablement of their demise. Oftentimes it's pain that shows us the way to a greater existence, and no amount of pain will ever be enough to make your life worth ending.