Wit (2001)

Wit is Mike Nichols’s 2001 American medical drama adapting Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name.

The film depicts Professor Vivian Bearing, a Donne scholar at a major American university, undergoing eight months of experimental chemotherapy for stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. Bearing has spent her academic career analyzing John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and considers her intellectual rigor sufficient preparation for any human experience. The treatment process shows that her scholarly preparation hasn’t prepared her for the physical degradation and emotional isolation that terminal illness imposes.

Emma Thompson plays Vivian Bearing. Christopher Lloyd plays research oncologist Dr. Harvey Kelekian. Audra McDonald plays nurse Susie Monahan. Jonathan M. Woodward plays clinical fellow Dr. Jason Posner. Eileen Atkins plays Professor E.M. Ashford. Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay from the Edson play. HBO Films produced the film on a budget of approximately 5 million dollars. The work premiered on HBO and won the Peabody Award.

Wit hit me harder than I was ready for.

Emma Thompson’s Vivian is prickly, proud and fiercely smart, and watching that armor come apart piece by piece is about as painful as acting gets for me. What grabbed me is that it’s a hospital drama about how smart people use their intelligence to hide from their own mortality. It would deserve its 9 on Thompson alone.

Few film productions match the intellectual ambition of Wit.

The work treats terminal illness, academic scholarship, and the Donne sonnets as related subjects instead of as separate concerns. Bearing’s scholarly career and her dying body are connected experiences. The Donne sonnets she’s analyzed for decades contain insights about death that her academic distance has prevented her from receiving fully. The treatment process forces her to confront what her scholarship has known intellectually without her experiencing it personally. Emma Thompson gives one of her career-defining performances.

She co-wrote the screenplay with director Mike Nichols. The HBO production format protected this picture from theatrical commercial pressure that might have required compromised content. The result is a work that reveals how television film production can produce material that theatrical release would have prevented.

Thompson as Bearing

Emma Thompson plays Vivian Bearing across the full progression of terminal cancer treatment.

The character starts the film as a vigorous fifty-year-old scholar at peak professional capacity. She ends the film dying from disease and treatment complications. The performance requires Thompson to depict physical and emotional deterioration across considerable timeline while maintaining the intellectual sharpness the character requires. The combination of physical commitment and dramatic intelligence has aged into recognition as one of her strongest performances.

I think the brilliance of Thompson’s work is how long she lets Vivian keep her wit as a weapon. The sharpness holds right up until the body can’t carry it anymore, and I found that more moving than any deathbed speech could be.

Thompson also co-wrote the screenplay with Mike Nichols.

Her dual role as performer and writer gave her considerable control over the material in ways that conventional star casting doesn’t provide. Performers who can write generally have advantages in shaping their roles that performers who can’t write must negotiate through production hierarchy. Thompson’s career has consistently shown this advantage. Her writing credits including Sense and Sensibility (1995) show wide range that’s supported her acting work throughout her career.

The Donne Material

The film integrates major John Donne content throughout.

Bearing’s professor E.M. Ashford delivers a critical reading of Donne’s Holy Sonnet six early in the film that establishes how Bearing has approached the poems. The scholarship treats death as occasion for rhetorical engagement instead of as personal reality. Bearing’s later illness produces conditions where the Donne sonnets become unexpectedly applicable to her actual experience instead of to her professional analysis.

The Donne scholarship is real instead of decorative.

Ashford’s reading of the comma versus semicolon in Holy Sonnet six proves that Donne’s original punctuation gives the poem different meaning than the standard edition presents. Bearing has spent her career on similar technical readings. The film proves that scholarship can produce insight that the scholar fails to receive personally. Knowing what poems say isn’t the same as experiencing what poems mean. The argument applies beyond Donne to academic handling of real material generally.

The comma scene thrilled me. A lecture on a single punctuation mark sounds like the dullest thing imaginable on paper, and Eileen Atkins makes it electric. As a writer, I adore a film that believes a comma can matter this much.

The Treatment Depiction

The film depicts chemotherapy effects, hospitalization, examination procedures, and the loss of dignity that medical treatment imposes on terminally ill patients.

The procedures are technically accurate. The fellow examination during which Dr. Posner conducts a thorough physical without engaging with Bearing as a person reflects documented patterns in medical training. The young physician treats the patient as case study instead of as colleague. Bearing recognizes the dynamic from her own teaching practice without being able to address it as patient.

The Posner examination is the scene I found hardest to sit through. Nobody in it is cruel, exactly, and that’s what makes it awful: a young doctor treating a formidable scholar like a specimen while she lies there recognizing the same habit from her own teaching.

Medical schools have used the depiction in their curricula to show problems with how clinicians can treat patients.

A number of American medical schools have reportedly screened Wit as part of bioethics instruction. The film has therefore produced direct impact on medical training that few films have matched. Cultural production sometimes affects the institutions it depicts. The treatment depiction in Wit has helped reshape medical education in ways that the original production may not have anticipated.

Is Wit as good as people say?

It’s a 9 from me, and the only thing keeping it off a 10 is how much it takes out of the viewer. I’d need to work up to sitting through Vivian’s decline a second time. Thompson, the Donne material and those brutal hospital scenes make it a film I’d press on anyone who cares about serious drama, and it proves what an HBO film could do when nobody was worrying about the box office.

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