Wit

WIT

REVIEWED BY JESSICA VAN DESSEL.

Our rating: 4 out of 5

Because of: nonsexual nudity, thematic elements

Rated:

Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., is a professor of 17th century metaphysical poetry. At forty-eight years old, she is very highly regarded in her field--the leading authority on the sonnets of John Donne. Her contributions to scholarship have been immeasurable. She has just been diagnosed with stage four of ovarian cancer. "There is," Bearing wryly observes, "no stage five."

In the opening scene of Wit, a Mike Nichols film based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning play by Margaret Edson, Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson) agrees to undergo an experimental treatment for the cancer: eight rounds of very heavy chemotherapy, all drugs at the full dose. "You must be very tough," her doctor tells her. "You needn't worry," she replies. Indeed, Bearing has been "tough" all her life-- first as a brilliant student, then as an uncompromising academic. She has published prestigiously. She has fought for tenure and won. Her classes have the reputation of being the most difficult on campus. Her teaching style is biting sarcasm. Her work is her life. She has no family or friends. She doesn't easily suffer fools or weaklings. Now, she is the weakling.

As the months and film-minutes go by, the hospital and the chemo take away Vivian's hair, health, strength, and dignity. We watch her being wheeled from place to place by an impersonal hospital staff. Student doctors study
her as a curiosity. There are humiliating procedures. There is the agony of constant nausea. The drugs wreck her immune system, and she must be placed in isolation. Vivian copes in the only way she knows: as an academic, acquiring the vocabulary, analyzing the theme, reading between the lines--and exercising her wit. Observing that the hospital's standard greeting is, "How are you feeling today?" Vivian remarks, "I have been asked 'How are you feeling?' while throwing up into a plastic basin. I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice... I'm waiting for the moment when I'm asked this question and I'm dead. I'm a little sorry I'll miss that."

Vivian's hospital room now contains almost the whole of her life. Few outsiders enter in. There is her physician, Dr. Kelekian (Christopher Lloyd); but he mostly drops by to make statements of unshakable confidence, and then departs in a breeze. Vivian's more immediate care is in the hands of the very young Jason Posner (Jonathan M. Woodward), an intern. Posner was once actually a student of Dr. Bearing's--they both find this awkward. ("I wish," Vivian mutters, "I had given him an A.") Like Vivian, Jason is smart, ambitious, and more interested in ideas than people. It's to nurse Suzy Monahan (Audra McDonald) that Vivian must turn with her day-to-day needs and her night-to-night fears.

Because Wit was originally a stage play, it features something you don't often find in film: monologue. They will tell you it doesn't work to have an actor speaking directly to the camera--but here it works. After all, Vivian is alone most of the time, with nothing to do but think. She has her memories. But some trouble her. The chances she didn't give her students, the kindness she never showed-- can she now dare to ask for a chance or kindness for herself? And she has the big questions: death, life, and eternal life. The metaphysical poets loved the big questions. John Donne wrote sonnet after sonnet on them. But it's one thing to study it, and quite another to live it. Will Vivian, facing the end of her own life, be able to say "Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty?"

Like a hospital ward, this film is austere, clean, and restricted to the essentials. Even the music is used sparingly--which makes it all the more effective. The acting is of course superb. Emma Thompson is willing to
take it as far as it needs to go in order to portray a dying cancer patient. I'd like to know: did she actually shave her head? Audra McDonald is wonderful as the concerned, caring, and ultimately involved nurse. And while we know that not all doctors are unfeeling bores who care only for their research, Lloyd and Woodward portray such a pair very believably. The movie uses some techniques, such as mixing flashbacks with the current scene, that must have been necessary on the stage, but are a little startling on screen. Once you understand, it causes no problem. Language is negligible. There are a couple brief moments of medical-related nudity. Vivian's suffering is not portrayed graphically, but the scenes are still intense and may upset some.

Wit is frank and unflinching; tough, like Vivian Bearing. Beneath the witty observations and scholarly humor, the film is truly tackling the big questions: how should we live our life and die our death? What about pain? What about fear? Is it enough to be smart and successful? How should we have done unto others if we'd now like them to do unto us? Where are the answers? In John Donne? These are Donne's Holy Sonnets, after all, where
he addresses the "three-personed God" in his own search for meaning. The sonnets are about "salvation anxiety," according to Posner: "You know you're a sinner. There's a promise of salvation, the whole religious thing. But you can't deal with it, because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. But you can't face life without it, so you write these screwed-up sonnets."

Perhaps the answer is something simpler. Something less metaphysical. As Vivian nears the end, her old professor and mentor, E.M. Ashford (Eileen Atkins), comes to visit. She reads to Vivian from a children's book, The
Runaway Bunny: If you run after me, the runaway bunny tells his mother, I will become a fish, and swim away from you. If you become a fish, his mother replies, I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you. "See, Vivian?" Prof. Ashford says, "A little allegory of the soul. Wherever it hides, God will find it."

The message, or Message, is subtle. The filmmakers might not even have intended it. But it is there. ne cannot look at life and death in any honesty without coming across the Truth. Needless to say, this movie is very powerful and a little disturbing. If you enjoy wit--if you like an intellectual way of looking at things-- if you are willing to be brutally honest-- only then should you try watching it. You may come away knowing if you truly have a Reason to say, "One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die."