With a Friend Like Harry... Review
by Mark Leeper (leeper AT mtgbcs DOT usae DOT avaya DOT com)April 27th, 2001
Wit
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: In spite of the title there is
very little humorous but a great deal that is
intelligent in this film that peels the layers
off of a woman going through an aggressive
therapy for insidious ovarian cancer. Even if
other filmmakers commonly looked at the process
of a slow and painful death, which they
certainly do not, this film would still stand
out for its intelligence. Mike Nichols has
always broken taboos. Rating: 8 (0 to 10), high +2 (-4 to +4)
In the early and mid-1990s several consecutive years films made for cable made my annual top ten films list. That stopped happening, but there have still been some very good films being made for cable. WIT is very likely to return to that tradition. This film, directed by Mike Nichols takes a topic rarely handled in dramatic film simply because it does not appeal to filmgoers. This is a film about a slow and painful course of chemo-therapy. The main character is Dr. Vivian Bearing (played by Emma Thompson), a professor of English Literature specializing in the poetry of John Donne. Donne's metaphysical poetry looking at life and death has made Bearing an expert in those subjects in the poetic abstract. But they have left her totally unprepared to consider those issues in the concrete or for this world of hospital life. Highly eloquent in intellectual matters she finds she cannot even clearly describe the pains she is feeling. Further she is shocked at her total loss of human dignity. She complains to the camera, but rarely to other people. In the early scenes we are shocked by the frank language that the doctors use to talk to her, but it is minor compared to the indignities she will soon be facing. In one case she talks to the camera while she is vomiting into plastic tray, only to have the nurse come in and measure the volume she has produced. She makes ironic comments to the hospital staff and nobody ever appears to notice.
There is a little too much of the cliche in WIT. The hospital experience causes Bearing to re-evaluate her approach to teaching. Through her whole learning and teaching career, her approach to poetry has been abstract and academic. That also her attitudes about living seem much like those of her academic career. She has no friends to visit her in the hospital. She has used intellectualization as a refuge from emotions and now she is paying the price. She alternately disparages the intellects of her students and wishes she had treated them a little better.
Now she has to deal with a doctor, a former student of hers, who uses that same unemotional approach in medicine when she needs as much of the human touch as she can get but is treated as an object. She finds her passion for Donne's poetry is mirrored by her doctor's wonder at the processes of cancer. Her closest human relationship is with Susie, her nurse, whose knowledge of English literature is small, but who strongly believes in the personal touch and in treating patients as humans rather than specimens. There of moments in the object lessons Bearing gets in the hospital that makes this story almost feel like A CHRISTMAS CAROL or PASSION FISH. Through much of the film we see that Bearing academic and personal lives seem so dry and joyless, one wonders why early on she does not at least consider suicide.
WIT is a very powerful and frightening look at severe illness and death. Certainly it stands among the best of films I have seen this year. I rate it an 8 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
[email protected]
Copyright 2001 Mark R. Leeper
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