Surprised by Oxford is a romantic drama written and directed by Ryan Whitaker, based on Carolyn Weber's memoirs about her time at Oxford University pursuing her doctorate. Caro (Rose Reid) is an accomplished student who won a scholarship to Oxford, but her early life was turbulent and she arrives in England reserved and slow to make friends.
An older student named Kent Weber (Ruairi O'Connor) takes an interest in her and offers to help her with her computer and adjust to her life at Oxford. After a series of false starts, she warms up to him. He is handsome and reasonably charming, but he is a Christian fanatic and his focus on religion is off-putting, both to Caro and the audience. He burns with a fire of confidence in his beliefs and has full command of the value of his convictions. He is peculiar for someone so young.
Director: Ryan Whitaker
Writers: Carolyn Weber, Ryan Whitaker
Stars: Simon Callow, Rose Reid, Mark Williams
She is an agnostic who leans towards atheism. Her early experiences left her scarred and cynical. She initially experiences her friendship with Kent as a distraction and, in fact, her Oxford academic advisor tells her so. She then slowly begins to realize that Kent's discussion of her Christian faith is leading her to a different perspective in her study of The Romantics at Oxford. In particular, Milton and C.S. Lewis emerge and she begins to consider her approaches to faith, as well as her contributions to literature.
The film's title is taken from Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy, in which he describes his early life and his conversion to Christianity. He famously expressed a crisis of faith to his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, who asked him to walk the grounds of Oxford and convinced him to hold on to his faith. After this event, Lewis focused his literary efforts toward Christian allegory in books such as The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis posited an explanation for the religious impulse as a teleological construct based on "inconsolable longing." It's a notion that figures prominently in the story of Caro's search for meaning. The film can lead one down a rabbit hole of investigation into these ideas, which is something good art should do, provoking a curiosity that lives beyond the end credits.
Kent in the film is more of an artifact of the script, an archetype, an inciting incident than a fully formed person. We never get any deeper into that character than her persistent belief in Christianity and her strange pride in her own virginity. Since we know that Kent Weber is a real person, and we know that Dr. Weber's book is 480 pages long, this is clearly the filmmaker's decision to keep the focus on Caro's spiritual journey and not the relationships between the two.
It's a shame, as it would have been a much more interesting story. Maybe that's another book. If this were not based on a true story, one could dismiss this film as subtle evangelical propaganda. However, the film has an intelligence and charm that will keep you watching to see how things turn out for Caro.
With all the spiritual turmoil about faith and chastity in the film, it could have gone very wrong, but Whitaker does a masterful job of wringing a romantic drama out of the story. Not having read the memoir, it occurs to me to wonder if he had to torture the book to get this version of the story.
Watch Surprised by Oxford 2023 Movie Trailer
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