Life in a Year (2020)
Directed by Mitja Okorn
No — Life in a Year is not especially woke, scoring 22 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Life in a Year arrives as a terminal-illness romance of the old school, in which a young man named Daryn (Jaden Smith) learns that his girlfriend Isabelle (Cara Delevingne) has cancer and resolves to compress an entire lifetime into her remaining months.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is notably multiracial, with Jaden Smith as the lead, Black parents played by Cuba Gooding Jr. and Nia Long, and RZA in support, but the diversity is presented without commentary as a natural ensemble.
Isabelle's parental figure Phil is explicitly a drag queen, giving the film a concrete LGBTQ+ presence, though it is a supporting element rather than a central theme.
Isabelle has some agency (she pushes Daryn's music career and proposes the wedding), but the film is fundamentally a male-centric romance in which the dying woman serves as the catalyst for the hero's growth.
There is a mild 'live your own life, not your parents' message via the Harvard-pressure subplot, but it is delivered as standard coming-of-age drama rather than preachy social instruction.
The film features Black leads but treats race as entirely incidental; there is no engagement with racial identity, history, or systemic themes.
No environmental or climate themes appear in the film.
No critique of wealth, capitalism, or class structures is present.
No body positivity themes or messaging are present.
No neurodivergence themes or characters are present.
The film is a fictional original story with no historical revisionism.
Why it received this score
Life in a Year arrives as a terminal-illness romance of the old school, in which a young man named Daryn (Jaden Smith) learns that his girlfriend Isabelle (Cara Delevingne) has cancer and resolves to compress an entire lifetime into her remaining months. The film was shot in 2017, shelved, and released in 2020 on a streaming service, which is the correct venue for a project that plays like a very long music video with a funeral at the end. The machinery is familiar: the manic pixie who teaches the sad boy to feel, the stern father who must be defied, the wedding staged in a hospital. We have seen this film many times. We will see it again.
The ensemble is unusually multiracial for the genre, and the film treats this as unremarkable, which is to its credit. Cuba Gooding Jr. and Nia Long play Daryn's parents, RZA drifts through in support, and Isabelle's parental figure Phil is a drag queen, played by Chris D'Elia with a commitment the material does not deserve. None of this is announced or explained. The drag queen exists because the script needed a guardian, not because the film wished to make a statement, and the restraint is welcome.
Where the film does reach for instruction, it is gentle. A Harvard-pressure subplot delivers the standard lesson about living your own life, and the delivery is soft enough to pass as coming-of-age drama. The larger architecture remains stubbornly male: Isabelle's illness is the engine of Daryn's artistic awakening, and her death is his graduation. She pushes his music career, she proposes the wedding, and then she dies so that he may move to New York. That is the transaction. The film performs it without irony, which is either sincerity or a failure of imagination. Either way, we note it and move on.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A 17 year old finds out that his girlfriend is dying, so he sets out to give her an entire life, in the last year she has left.
Questions about Life in a Year
Is Life in a Year woke?
No — Life in a Year is not especially woke, scoring 22 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does Life in a Year have any woke elements?
2 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by LGBTQ+ Themes (45) and Representation Casting (45). On LGBTQ+ Themes: Isabelle's parental figure Phil is explicitly a drag queen, giving the film a concrete LGBTQ+ presence, though it is a supporting element rather than a central theme.
How does Life in a Year compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #73 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.