Wit

Rating:
Summary: Emma Thompson's finest performance (so far!)
Review: I can't add an awful lot to the reviews already written.

Quite simply this is a brilliant and essential film. It's also a travesty that the DVD is not available in the UK. Please wake up HBO/Warner Bros!

This Emma Thompson's finest hour (and hasn't she had some fine ones?).

You owe yourself this movie.


Rating:
Summary: Nothing Tops it
Review: I've never been so moved by a movie in my short 19 years. Watching Wit gave me a new look on life. I highly recommend this move to anyone and everyone. Have a box of tissue ready!

Rating:
Summary: Stunningly Powerful!
Review: 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.






Rating:
Summary: Just as Good The Second Time
Review: I experienced "Wit" when it first came out, and was deeply moved by the grace and dignity of the story. Cancer is a cruel killer, and this story brings out all the nobility of the character of Vivian Bearing.

After three years I'd forgotten all about it. Only dim memories of the shape of the story remained, although the opening scene reminded me I had seen it before. This time was just as moving and filled with wonder at the production -- the acting, the editing, the script. Marvelous, marvelous.

I hope it doesn't take 3 years to view it again.


Rating:
Summary: Amazing performances/true depiction
Review: What an amazing movie! Back when this movie was first shown on TV, I wasn't able to see it, as we did not subscribe to the premium movie channel that produced it. Then when I DID have the chance, it was near the time of my own mother's battle with cancer, and I just didn't see how watching this would help me. But having just finished watching it now on what just happens to be the eve of the two-year anniversary of my mom's death from uterine cancer, my heart is touched by the amazing and SO accurate portrayal of a patient fighting cancer in a not-so-humankind-oriented location as a hospital. Watching this movie, I could see in the various characters portrayed here the faces of those that cared for my mom -- the too clinical intern, the doctor interested in the "test case/research subject" patient, and the nurse who stopped to take the time to gently put lotion on the hands of a dying patient, that loving touch that we saw from so many more nurses and technicians than we ever saw from doctors. There were a few special doctors, but fighting cancer in a teaching hospital like my mom did, she was very much a case study, just as portrayed in the movie.

I know I've gotten slightly away from topic, not so much reviewing the movie as passing along my family's experience. But I wanted those who read this and who have NOT experienced a cancer death in their own family to know just how incredibly real this movie is, down to every tiny detail. While it is sometimes difficult to watch, it is also eye-opening and in ways, instructive. AFter watching this, no one who has to go through an experience like this will be surprised by their experience in the hospital. This is a GOOD thing, as we were encountering not-so-pleasant surprises every day of Mom's hospitalization.

I have ALWAYS enjoyed Emma Thompson's work, but I have even more respect for her now having seen how open she was to portraying even the ugliest of side effects of cancer treatment -- the pain, the shaking, the nausea, the mouth and throat sores, the loss of immune system, the hair loss, etc. The earlier review here was SO accurate in saying you forget you are watching actors, they are SO real. Well worth a viewing if you have the opportunity!


Rating:
Summary: Brevity is the Soul of Wit....
Review: An unbelievably touching story. Emma Thompson is brilliant.
Watch it.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best I've seen
Review: Evertime I watch it, Wit makes me laugh and weep at the same time. Emma Thompson is simply the best

Rating:
Summary: so sad and so important
Review: In the character of Professor Vivian Bearing, Emma Thompson takes us from the diagnosis of advanced ovarian cancer, to death. Along the way, she shows us her relations with various hospital staff, including her cold doctor and her research-focused former student

Looking back on her life, she sees in her rigid standards the same lack of humanity she now suffers under. While nurse Suzy has less formal education than the doctor or Professor Bearing, she had a lesson to teach them all in effect of kindness, caring and humanity on hope and comfort.

Important for medical personnel to see how their actions are viewed from the patient perspective. Important for all others as a reminder that success and recognition will not save one in the end. Only compassion and caring relationships with other humans can really mitigate suffering.

I didn't give it five stars because it was a bit long and drawn-out in the middle and I didn't find the young doctor's performance entirely convincing. But Thompson's performance was excellent, especially at the end.