Some Kind of Beautiful (2014)
Directed by Tom Vaughan
No — Some Kind of Beautiful is not woke, scoring 10 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Some Kind of Beautiful arrives from 2014 with the confidence of a man who has not read a room in decades.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is moderately diverse for a 2014 rom-com (Jessica Alba, Salma Hayek, Merrin Dungey), but their presence is incidental to the story rather than a deliberate representational statement.
The film was roundly criticized for dated gender politics, centering a lecherous professor chasing undergraduates as a male fantasy; this is the opposite of a feminist agenda despite some career-minded female characters.
There are classroom lecture scenes, but they concern literature and personal charisma rather than any social-issue moralizing.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
Latina and Black actors appear but race is never a subject of the narrative or commentary; there is no racial consciousness on display.
No environmental or climate themes whatsoever.
Wealth and privilege are the backdrop of the protagonists' lives but are never critiqued; no eat-the-rich messaging exists.
The entire premise revolves around 'beautiful women' and a 'tanned, athletic' young girlfriend; the film's gaze is the antithesis of body positivity.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
No historical revisionism; the film is a contemporary romantic comedy with no engagement with history.
Why it received this score
Some Kind of Beautiful arrives from 2014 with the confidence of a man who has not read a room in decades. Pierce Brosnan plays Richard Haig, a Cambridge literature professor who spends his nights with undergraduates and his days lecturing on poetry, until a pregnancy, a green card, and a sister-in-law complicate the arrangement. The film was released under different titles in different countries, a marketing strategy that suggests nobody involved could decide what the thing was. It grossed six million dollars against a thirty million dollar budget. Critics were unkind. The unkindness was earned.
For our purposes, the film is a fascinating artifact of near-total absence. The cast includes Jessica Alba, Salma Hayek, and Merrin Dungey, which lends the proceedings a surface diversity the screenplay never notices. Race is not a subject here. Neither is class, though wealth saturates every frame: the Cambridge townhouse, the Los Angeles property bought as a wedding gift, the hotel bars. Nobody eats anyone. Money is treated as weather, something that simply falls on people, and it never occurs to the script to ask where it comes from. There is no environmental concern, no neurodivergent character, no historical argument, and no queer presence of any kind. The gaze, meanwhile, is fixed on tanned athleticism and the word beautiful, which places the film at the precise opposite pole from any modern conversation about bodies.
What the film does offer is a classroom. Richard lectures, and the lectures concern charisma and literature, delivered as performance. No social sermon is smuggled into them, which is a small mercy. The gender politics are a different matter. A lecherous professor pursuing students is presented as a lifestyle with dignity, and the women orbit him as prizes. This is not a feminist text. It is a fantasy of one, wearing a tweed jacket. The result is a romantic comedy that fails as romance, as comedy, and as cultural document, leaving only the faint historical interest of a film that arrived already expired.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
By day, Richard Haig is a successful and well-respected English professor at renowned Trinity College in Cambridge. By night, Richard indulges his own romantic fantasies with a steady stream of beautiful undergraduates. But Richard has grown tired of the game and is looking for something more meaningful and lasting. So when Kate, Richard’s tanned, athletic, 25-year-old American girlfriend tells him that she is pregnant, Richard is thrilled. He looks forward to having a family of his own, being a father his children could be proud of, not some sex-fueled bobcat. There is only one problem. Richard’s not in love with Kate. Richard is in love with Kate’s sister, Olivia. He had been in love with her ever since he first saw her.
Questions about Some Kind of Beautiful
Is Some Kind of Beautiful woke?
No — Some Kind of Beautiful is not woke, scoring 10 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Some Kind of Beautiful have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 20.
How does Some Kind of Beautiful compare to other 2014 movies?
It ranks #130 of the 303 films from 2014 we've scored; their average is 13. The wokest is Selma (68).
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.