(There are spoilers here if you do not want to know anything about the story.)
Years ago, back when there were more people contributing to this blog than just myself, there was a category of review that looked at movie adaptations of books. Most of those posts were written by other people. And the most recent of those was more than five years ago. But I am reviving the category because one of my favorite books, Surprised by Oxford, was adapted into a movie, and premiered over the weekend. Due to the reality of the post-Covid world, many film festivals allow for the streaming of movies. And so, my wife and I streamed Suprised by Oxford as it premiered at the Heartland International Film Fest.
What I love about Suprised by Oxford is exactly what I thought would make it a difficult book to adapt to the screen. First, it is a memoir, and not just a memoir, but a very literary memoir. Carolyn Weber is an English professor and Suprised by Oxford is the memoir of her first year at Oxford (to get her Master’s degree, though she would stay another two years to finish her Doctorate). It is a rare page that does not have a quote or literary allusion. The memoir is about the joint finding of love, with the man who is now her husband, and with God. The tension between those intertwined storylines is much of its charm.
Caro is agnostic. She is from a Hungarian immigrant family (in Canada), and after numerous financial problems, her father disappears from the family life, to escape creditors and maybe the law. He shows up randomly, and usually with anger. Caro’s mother works hard but struggles to provide for the family. They move frequently. Her older brother, and then Caro, and then her younger sister have to work to help keep the family fed, clothed, and housed. But Caro is gifted academically. She is accepted into a program for gifted students in high school. And then wins a full scholarship to college (although she has to work nearly full time for expenses as well as maintaining straight As to keep the scholarship.) Upon the recommendation of her college professors, she applies to Oxford and, again, wins a full scholarship.
The love interest in the book and the movie is Kent Weber (his real name, the son of Stu Weber, the Oregon pastor and author of a number of books, most well-known of which is Tender Warrior.) Kent’s real name is almost never mentioned in the book. He is almost always called TDH (Tall, Dark, and Hansome). There are two additional memoirs, Holy is the Day and the most recent Sex and the City of God, that follow up on the story of their romance and life together.
Every book that is adapted to screen has to figure out how to deal with the different ways that stories are told between literary and visual media. Surprised by Oxford is a memoir, not just telling a story but grappling with ideas. The movie has to tell the story differently from the book. The backstory is placed up front in the movie, and the details are slightly different. Caro’s father is arrested. Her college professor, who tells her that she is missing the point of one of Dunne’s poems, which is the start of how she grapples with faith, does not die at the end of the semester in the movie. The heavy bag that she has to grapple across Oxford because she missed her stop is full of books in the movie instead of the shoes in the book. The college at Oxford where she attends is a fictional Tirion College instead of the real Oriel College. None of these details really matter. Most of the details in the movie are based on real things, from the police officer giving her a ride on his horse that is in the opening and closing scenes of the movie to the lecturer calling her out about her belief in absolute truth during the middle of his lecture.
But characters are compressed or details altered to make sense of the movie being set now instead of in the mid-1990s. (TDH shows her how to use email in the book, and it is an email, not a text message, that starts their first conflict. And the Chariots of Fire was on a VHS, not projected while sitting in punts on the river.) When Caro started, women had only been admitted to her college for about a decade. Men outnumbered women nearly 10 to 1. The movie compresses the provost (male) and an academic mentor (female) into a single character. The diverse and large group of friends from the book is only about 4 in the movie. The book is about 450 pages, and the movie lasts 90 minutes. A movie just can’t get the same level of detail, and you can’t spend the time introducing ten or so friends that have important contributions to her story in the book. But that distortion means that the characters and back story is narrowed. The dialogue, which I think sounds like John Green’s characters in both the book and the movie, could do with a few more perspectives in the movie, but that isn’t a fundamental distortion of the point. (The scenes around the library with the pen are all completely fiction for the movie. And while I understand the point of it to get Caro to the provost’s country home, she actually was invited because it was Easter weekend, and Caro and her academic female mentor had become friends. The library scene gives a sense of the pressure, which creates tension, but it feels a bit forced to me, although it does add a bit of humor. One issue with the country home visit in the movie is that they are all alone. In the book, being around a multigenerational family is part of the healing and rest. As someone who was very thankful for my multigenerational church and being invited into the homes of families while I was in seminary, I think a scene of children may have made sense, but that is really personal opinion and experience more than artistic judgement.)
But there will always be choices made that I just don’t understand. In the movie, TDH introduces her to Christianity, and when she has questions, he recommends that she read Surprised by Joy by CS Lewis. That is clearly the reference in the title, but it isn’t accurate to the memoir. TDH challenges her actually to read the bible for herself. The movie shows her falling behind in school because she is reading Surprised by Joy. But Surprised by Joy is a quick read of just under 300 pages. As a literature student, she would have easily read it in a day if she wanted. But reading scripture and studying it did take her time in the book. And it wasn’t only the bible but conversation stories and theology and biblical commentaries that mattered to her coming to understand Christianity and Jesus. The CS Lewis book that is most referenced in the book is Screwtape Letters, which makes more sense to her literary orientation. (Follow up: the director and screenwriter commented on Twitter and said she was falling behind because Surprised by Joy was a gateway drug to other Lewis and Christian books, which I comment about below. I concede the point. He is right.)
Maybe it is a literary device, but especially in the second half of the book, when she is moving toward faith or after she becomes a Christian, she regularly references thinking about the ideas of Thomas Merton, Brennan Manning, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lewis, and other older spiritual writers. But I suspect that she was devoting quite a bit of time to spiritual reading, without falling behind as she is shown to be doing in the book.
Overall, I did really like the movie even if it was not the book. The filming was beautiful. The acting was good. I did not really love the choice of TDH if for no other reason than I didn’t really think he was all that handsome, and he was barely taller than she was. You don’t get a designation of TDH if you are basically the same height and not really as good-looking as the female characters.
Surprised by Oxford is what I would call a Christian movie. Christian movies have to grapple with God and Christianity and are often apologetically oriented. In the best sense of the term, apologetics is telling one’s own story to explain how you came to faith or why faith makes sense to you. Too often, I think bad apologetics is about argument and debate. Surprised by Oxford is similar in apologetic feel to Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic because as much as Carolyn Weber did struggle with the problem of evil and supernatural events and other theological problems, in the end, her grappling was with the inability of reason to solve the problems fully and how she came to accept that reason was not by itself capable of getting her to faith or to eliminate faith as an option. Even if it is a Christian movie because of the theme, the occasional (contextually appropriate) swear word and discussion of sex and sexuality would make it fairly risque in the earlier era of Christian movies that I am more familiar with.
I relate to Surprised by Oxford and the grappling with problems because even if I grew up in Christianity and I don’t really have the same theological issues that Carolyn Weber had, I love the beauty of faith that she presents. I am only a couple of years younger than she is. But when I was in seminary, I was handling postmodernism and truth claims, and the role of the bible in very different ways. (Largely, those differences were responses to our contexts.) Weber was coming to a pretty conservative position on scripture and absolute truth. While I was coming to accept some of the postmodern critiques because of the limits of our humanity. We cannot fully see the absolute truth. I do not embrace relativism as the professor in the movie does (and I do not think many people do at this point), but I think that it is only God who has full access to absolute truth. It is not that we cannot find the truth, but that we can only really find a part of the whole of truth. Scripture is the word of God and is vastly important. But the modernist use of the bible, I think, has distorted it. Even so, I want to be a part of the group that is in the book. Her story is full of brilliant, but still human people, people I would like to be friends with and talk to. And people, in the end, are more oriented toward their friendship and love of one another than debate.
In many ways, despite tension between stories of finding love with TDH and God, Surprised by Oxford is mostly about finding God, becoming a Christian, being baptized (not in the movie), and trying to understand what it means to be a Christian. TDH is there; he is an important part of her life. But he is also very busy with his studies, and for the first time in her life, Caro is not working a nearly full-time job to support herself. There are weeks that go by without them seeing one another in the book (they don’t share any classes in the book). But there is also clearly much time where they do spend together that is not highlighted. The movie jumps forward to the wedding, even if it is only a postlude. This is a memoir, so we know they are going to end up together, even if it is a roundabout path that doesn’t really lead them to marriage until years after the close of the movie.
When I finished the movie, I was unsure what I thought of it. It was more evangelistic than I wanted it to be. But it also didn’t directly tell the story of the beauty of faith as much as I felt the book did. I picked up the book immediately and read it through in about 36 hours. And then I watched the movie again. No work of art can fully present the lives of people. Any attempt necessarily introduces fiction as a way to make the story presentable. A story that tells the events of a year would have to be at least a year-long to do it justice (maybe longer to get at different perspectives). At the same time, I wanted there to be more romance on the screen, even though I know that is not accurate to the story. In the memoir, Caro does not really come to acknowledge her love for TDH until he leaves. That is why she runs after him (as both the movie and book show). TDH wants more from the start. But he has to be patient (or not in the case of his time with Ms. Georgia, which is presented much more clearly in the book).
In the scene in the movie where they go to see the painting of Jesus that depicts him at the door knocking, Caro realizes that there is no handle for Jesus to open the door. TDH (in the movie) tells her that it is because the door can only be opened from the inside (in the book, this is said by someone who isn’t in the movie at all). That painting is a real metaphor for their relationship. TDH waits patiently for Caro to be open to him. That doesn’t mean that TDH allows her to abuse him (that is in both the movie and the book), but it does mean that there is a longer view of what may come, not just interest in a quick romance. There is a real beauty to a patient relationship but oriented towards the whole life. In many romantic movies, I wonder if the couple would be together for five years. The differences that draw them together don’t seem to be balanced with something that is shared. In the case of Surprised by Oxford, the differences are first overcome by Caro coming to faith so that there is a shared thing that they can build on.
(I am not positive because there isn’t really a good shot, but I think Carolyn Weber does a very brief cameo at about the 50-minute mark where there is a female lecturer in the distance, and the provost walks in. I may be wrong about that, but I think it is her.)
The Heartland Film Festival runs through Oct 16, and you can still buy access to stream the movie.
Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook