Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Life in a Year’ on Amazon Prime, a YA Weepie That Fails to Make us Weep

A few lives in a year after it was filmed, teen-weeper Life in a Year has debuted on Amazon Prime. A product of Will and Jaden Pinkett Smith’s production house, and starring their son Jaden Smith alongside Cara Delevingne, the movie was shot in 2017, when the post-The Fault in Our Stars “sick-lit” tissuesoaker genre wasn’t oversaturated like, um, a soaked tissue, and prior to supporting star Cuba Gooding Jr. being canceled for a growing pile of sexual-misconduct allegations. Maybe that’s why it’s premiering with little fanfare, no early reviews and buried in your Amazon menu. But that doesn’t deter us from giving it a fair shake, nosirree. And the truth may be, its hype-free release may simply be because it sucks 1,000 rotten eggs.

LIFE IN A YEAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Daryn has it all: Athleticism, intelligence, a Range Rover, a gigantic house, an all-but-guaranteed track to Harvard and, because he’s played by Jaden Smith, he’s got mad skillz as a rapper. He also has a father (Gooding) who grooms his success with an iron fist and a pair of tweezers. I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if he schedules his son’s bowel movements and verbally flagellates him when he’s 30 seconds late for a date with the porcelain bowl. Thanks to a little gentle urging from his mom (Nia Long), the taskmaster allows the boy to take a break from hand-chiseling his college application out of marble to go to a concert with his dingaling pals (JT Neal and Stony Blyden), and through a highly moronical series of occurrences, he meets Isabelle (Delevingne), then reconnects with her through the ice cream shop she works at, which is one of those places where the oversized staff of a small business performs an elaborately choreographed musical number every time a customer drops a quarter in the tip jar. So of course Daryn keeps plinking coins into the goddamn thing.

Now folks, at this point we’re about 15 minutes and 25 embarrassing scenes into the movie, so buckle up, cuz it really gets rancid. Isabelle is from the Other Side of the Tracks. She doesn’t go to school, she lives alone in a small apartment in a shaky neighborhood, is best friends with a GASP drag queen (Chris D’Elia) and she’ll be damned if she’s interested in some Richie Rich in a $379 cardigan. She nicknames him Square, because he’s square as a 1950s astronaut; it’s an insult at first, but soon becomes a term of endearment, because he charms her, and if he didn’t, she’d die alone and that would be a really depressing movie. Sorry, got ahead of myself there — before she reveals the truth of her terminal cancer via melodramatically hysterical shrieking, she makes him forego reservations at the fancy restaurant for a burrito from a truck, and he responds with the confusion and disgust of the Queen when she’s forced to wield plastic silverware.

So, right, anyway, she’s dying and, much to his grim-assed dad’s flaming-hot chagrin, Daryn commits to filling her last year on our mortal plane with all the stuff of an entire life — you know, getting a pet, buying a house, celebrating every birthday at once with a cake studded with dozens of candles, all that. In response, she arranges a session with her music-producer friend (RZA) so he can cut a hot hip-hop track and encourage him to follow his dreams and passion instead of falling into Fascist Dad’s unbending career track to superficial success. None of this goes over well with Fascist Dad, and there are ups and downs and confrontations and fallings-in-love and fallings-out and scenes in the chemo ward and this all sure seems so very dramatically precarious. So when do we get to the dying? Oh — I get it. I’m dying just watching this.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is my seventh YA snotrag-filler of 2020 — see also: Chemical Hearts, Babyteeth, All Together Now, All the Bright Places, Spontaneous and Clouds. Life in a Year is easily the least of them. It’s so very sub-The Fault in Our Stars.

Performance Worth Watching: Please don’t ask. An avalanche of rote cliches leaves no member of the cast unburied.

Memorable Dialogue: At the end of every date, Daryn always asks, “One more?” and Isabelle says, “One more.” Until she’s the one who starts asking. KEWWT!

Sex and Skin: I think Daryn and Isabelle inevitably make it offscreen, but this movie has been edited with a power stapler, so one can only assume.

Our Take: Life in a Year poses a pungent if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest philosophical conundrum: If a weepie fails to make us weep, does it actually exist? This is the type of movie that wants so desperately for us to cry, it would reach out of our TVs and squeeze our tear ducts if it could — but even then, it’d jab us in the knee and the coccyx because it has no idea what it’s doing. This is the type of movie that includes a line of dialogue that’s roughly “I’m going to (INSERT CONCEPT OF MOVIE HERE) you!” This is the type of movie that fulfills the idea of what filmmakers think people think movies should be. This is a bad movie.

Oh, but Life in a Year thinks it has it all: Family drama, comedy, tragedy, romance, an awkward dinner with parents, fat jokes aimed at the character who used to be fat but is now looks like a clothing model in a Target ad, quasi-poetic scenes on merry-go-rounds, cutesy montages, estranged-mother shenanigans, scenes in the chemo ward, a Big Sean cameo, forbidden yearnings of being a musician, impulsive truth-blurtings, the ominous inevitable looming spectre of death, the ominous inevitable looming spectre of Harvard (couldn’t a character once in the history of film aim for Dartmouth?), a father who used to be the janitor and now “he owns the company” (this is the funniest scene), insultingly stereotypical portrayals of trans people and the one thing every movie needs, CUTE HEDGEHOG REACTION SHOTS!

All that, and you’ll feel diddly-squat. None of it works. The dialogue is forced, stilted and cringeworthy; the plot is a series of contrivances; the performances go Tyler Perry off-the-rails. It’s tone-deaf as a very tone-deaf thing. It shimmies and clunks and sputters. It’s so artificial, its quest to invoke an emotional response is like trying to wring blood out of a plastic turnip. I’m thinking maybe you shouldn’t watch it.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Life in a Year makes The Fault in Our Stars look like the Citizen Kane of ugly-cry drippy-nose teen dramas.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Life in a Year on Amazon Prime