Wit
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Movie Reviews of Wit
Movie Review: A painful yet must-watch for the message it delivers
Summary: 5 Stars
I had put off watching "Wit" as I wasn't sure how I could get through a movie devoted entirely to one person suffering through cancer until her ultimate demise. Well, I finally watched it and I must say - it's hard to sit through this emotionally-searing movie, yet it does get many points across.
The multi-talented Emma Thompson [who also co-wrote the screenplay] plays English Literature Professor Vivian who is diagnosed with stage 4 Ovarian cancer and is persuaded by her doctor [Christopher Lloyd] to undertake an experimental therapy with maximum dosage drugs. The viewer is then taken along on Vivian's journey through the world of cancer treatment - when we next see her [after her diagnosis], Vivian is bald and so we understand she has already undergone chemotherapy - she then takes us via flashbacks to her initial treatment, tests and so on before proceeding to the present.
The dialogue, especially when Vivian is talking to us is filled with wit [just as the title implies] as she helps us understand her pain, frustrations and fear - but it is also a searing indictment of the clinical and callous manner in which many members of the medical establishment treat patients - the lab technician who leaves Vivian waiting in an uncomfortable chair as he goes out on his break, the former student turned doctor who leaves Vivian strapped on a gynaecological examination table as he looks around for a female assistant, the indifferent and impersonal doctor etc - these people are so devoid of human warmth and treat their patient as though they were just a specimen and not a person. My own experiences with some members of the medical establishment bears this out, though I have come across some pleasant nurses and the nurse who forms a bond with Vivian here, Susie [Audra McDonald] embodies those that truly do nurse the body and soul of their patients.
"Wit" is an absolute tearjerker and many parts had me cringing, yet it is compelling, insightful and poignant. There are two memorable scenes in this movie that have stayed with me - one in which Nurse Susie brings Vivian popsicles and sits down to share it with her whilst speaking about an important subject, and the most poignant is when Vivian's former professor comes to visit and climbs into bed [Vivian is on her deathbed] with Vivian and just holds her whilst reading "The Runaway Bunny" by Margaret Wise Brown. Be sure to keep the tissues on hand as you watch this!
Movie Review: Wit: A Matter of Life and Death
Summary: 5 Stars
No film as ever had such a profound effect on me as Mike Nichols' "Wit" It takes the viewer on a roller-coaster ride of emotions. One minute you will be laughing, the next sobbing. This is a powerful, poignant film about the ravages of cancer and the nature of life and death. Mike Nichols received well deserved Emmy and Golden Globes for his direction.Emma Thompson gives what may be the performance of her career as Dr. Vivian Bearing, a strict and brilliant professor of John Donne's metaphysical poetry who is dying from ovarian cancer. She flawlessly and wrenchingly depicts the slow decline of a briliant woman. Vivian is receiving experimental treatment, and is often treated as nothing more than a speciman by her doctors. As she is hospitalized, she observes and analyzes her condition and the effect it is having on her life. Vivian's remarks are often funny, but as the cancer spreads through her body, she realizes that she has to reasses her life. In a heartrending scene, Vivian breaks down and says, "I used to feel safe." She was always a woman in control, and now that control is being savagely ripped from her by an invisible enemy. Eventually Vivian decides that when her heart stops, she does not wish to be revived: "Why make things more complicated?"
As the illness reaches its last stages, we see Vivian moaning and shaking with excrutiating pain. It is nearly unbearable to watch, but we must. The final scene, where Vivian is held like a child and read a children's story by her elderly teacher, is the most heartbreaking image ever put on film. "I feel so bad," Vivian manages to say, and that is all she can say.
"Wit" is a intensely moving and painful film to watch. It shows death by cancer in minute detail, never letting the viewer off easy. And that is how it should be. "Wit" is an educational experience as well as a cinematoc one, and you will leave the film understanding better the hell that cancer patients go through. It will leave you sad and haunted, but also comforted. For even though a woman has suffered and died, she kept her dignity....and her wit, with her until the very end.
Movie Review: One of the best movies I've seen.
Summary: 5 Stars
The dialog cuts with remarkable skill. The dry wit, its acute clinical treatment, dissects the subject matter so coldly that the viewer embraces any sensible warmth. The movie is utterly sad. It criticizes life and death more so from the perspective of the clinician, like John Donne and the good doctors Kelekian and Jason, who themselves are unwitting subjects of examination. The underlying theme, life's meaning, is neither found in the acute examination of metaphysical poetry, nor in the methodical study of insidious cancer cells; rather, the movie presents a basic and existential answer.
The meaning of life is found in a gentle nurse's treatment who pulls up a chair because her patient is lonely and scared of dying. And as the nurse and doctor ponder the tangles of knowledge between the physical and metaphysical, the doctor asks the nurse, rather pejoratively, what they teach in nursing school. The nurse smiles, the doctor disappears, and the scene ends as the nurse massages lotion onto the hands of her dying patient. In the end, it's the illusion of a caregiver (Professor Ashford) who guides the protagonist into death, lying besides her, reading a children's book, an allegory of God the mother of all things. One hardly notices the subtle contrast with Donne. Yes, I'd say it's the clinician, and not the patient, who's critically examined here.
The story dramatizes the clash between knowledge and reality, the clinician and the caretaker. And we the moviegoer are left awash as our sentiments our soiled with a stain of impeccable humanity. I love this movie. If you like philosophy, literature, or if you just want to cry for no reason of your own, you'll love it too.
Movie Review: This film will never leave MY mind! EVER!
Summary: 5 Stars
I watched WIT two months ago.I may NEVER watch it again.This is film is SO close and SO intimate, that it's images and characters still haunt me to this day.(I tend to be rather hypochondriacal, so if disease and it's ravages are not your bag,then you best beware!)Yes, this play does take one through the painful and excrutiating moment-by-moment struggle with terminal cancer,both from the patients' internal/external mental and physical suffering ,as well as from the lens of the all-too-often coldly clinical and microscopically-observable medical community.
What one DOES glean from this amazing film adaptation of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize winning play is the irony in which we approach subject matter, whatever it might be, then how we reassess the same material under different circumstances.Emma Thompson's amazing Locke-loving English professor Vivian Bearing does just that-and at what a price!
It was neat to see Audra Mc Donald in a film, as since the time WIT was produced for HBO, she has gone on to garner four TONY AWARDS for her work on stage.IT TRULY DOES NOT GET BETTER THAN THIS!
As a recommendation,try watching the earlier THE DOCTOR with William Hurt and compare the theme to WIT.Both films get you thinking about how we respond to people at any given moment.Usually we can only really empathize/sympathize with someone else's dilemma until we are faced with the same or similar dilemma ourselves.
CAUTION: If you have recently lost someone to illness or are suffering yourself in some way, this movie may be a little too much for your raw nerves.You may best wait a while.
Movie Review: Stunningly Powerful!
Summary: 5 Stars
If one can watch "WIT" without feeling compassion,empathy,sensitivity, or walk away without feeling a sensation of change in their world-- then that particular individual is 'Dead.'
In "Wit," Emma Thomson is at the absolute height of her art--Playing the scholary, intellectual professor to perfection, she recites Donne like a second language and expects others to also.
When Thomson is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, not even her poetry can save her or her intellect or the hard shell she wears like a sort of armor--
She begins to shed every layer and bare her soul like the child she once was. Instead of desiring Donne, she desires child-hood books--such a"Runaway Bunny."
But No scene will move one more than when (Vivian's) mean, old professor comes to visit her in the hospital-- She hears Vivian crying and takes off her shoes and crawls into bed with her, holding her. "Shall I recite some Donne for you, Vivian?" Vivian shakes her head and the professor reads to her from a book she had bought for her grand-child "Runaway Bunny."
Sometimes the people we least expect can be our brightest angels!
The viewer will feel their souls rise up and meet redemption in mid-air--they will experience the core of the earth tremble beneath their feet-- if they do not--
they do not live.
***NOTE*** One must wait an entire carreer for a role like this one, and Emma Thomson is pure and utter perfection.