Wit

Rating:
Summary: WOW!!!
Review: We had to watch this movie for my religion and philosophy class. Let's just say this is the first time the entire class has stopped talking, they were completely speechless. I still don't know how to explain the flood of emotions that came while watching this movie. If I hadn't been sitting in a room full of other high school students I would've cried, and I'm not a tears kind of person. I give this movie, much kudos. I'll never forget it.

Rating:
Summary: Makes you think.
Review: This movie was absoutly briliant, it was so touching and keeps you watching. you dont know where the story is going to end . and when it does you wish it hadent.i have watched this 2 times and the first time i wasent sure what the name was. i searched for this movie for a month and today i asked the sales man at the local video store and he told me. i picked up the video and was soooooo happy. i am defently adding this movie to my collection. i would defently recomend this movie to all age groups who have a very open mind and can sit and take the time to listen to every moment of this story.

Rating:
Summary: As Good as Acting Gets
Review: Emma Thompson surpasses her previous work in my view. There is an almost palpable sense that no "acting" is taking place: the character simply exists in a reality without art. Of course this is a way of defining transcendent art.
The direction is superb as well.
What is deficient is the lack of special features on the DVD. This is inexcusable, especially the lack of any commentary from Ms. Thompson who co-wrote the screenplay along with Mike Nichols. Surely, interviews with one or both would not be prohibitively expensive. Shame on HBO.
See this film. It is not maudlin, as the subject matter might lead one to expect. It is simply true.

Rating:
Summary: Utterly Outstanding!
Review: This movie was one of the best movies I've seen ever. Now that I am in Nursing school at Michigan State, this movie touched me greatly. Our professor played this movie for everyone to see and I'm glad she did. It not only covered ethical issues, but moral and legal issues as well and did it in a way that was almost spellbounding. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen! I recommend this to anyone going in the healthcare profession. Excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Prepare to cry, a serious movie about a serious topic
Review: Emma Thompson is incredible, in a riveting performance about a woman professor who prides herself on her perseverance and steadfastness, dealing with not only a serious case of cancer but the de-personalization associated with its treatment.

This movie is not for those who want light entertainment. It is a serious movie that may lead you to think more closely on how you live your life and how much consideration you have for others in it.

Emma Thompson plays Dr. Vivian Bearing a staunch English professor specializing in a 17th century poet, Donne, most well known for his poems on death and the afterlife, or lack thereof.

Ironically, Dr. Bearing though literate to the greatest degree on this most difficult of authors, has never really absorbed in a human sense the material she has spent her life researching. It was all abstract. In this sense she has been very "abstract" in dealing with the people around her as well.

Initially in dealing with the disease, Dr. Bearing has attempted to maintain this abstract distance with her own disease, refusing to yield to the potential reality of its outcome. Through discussions with a former student who is now one of the doctors treating her, she comes to judge her own actions by observing those around her.

Not wanting to give the movie away, I can only say, it is a hard movie not to cry throughout. Anyone who has seen a family member go through cancer treatment will recognize some of the buzzwords and much of the inadvertant rudeness of the medical staff. This is not meant as a complaint. I can see how this happens. The staff may have to; as a matter of self-preservation, keep a distance to continue to do this work day-to-day. For the patient though, this is as personal as it gets.

In one scene, Emma Thompson as Dr. Bearing has a discussion with her former student where he refers to patients as a means to an end for his research, not considering he is also refering to the very patient he is now treating. Her character is content to keep this abstraction, but you as the viewer are well aware of the biting coldness of this discussion. Magnificent writing, heartless reality. Numbing emotionally.

Great movie, it is emotionally wrenching to watch however.

Rating:
Summary: Emma Thompson is superb
Review: The senior academic of Wit has stage 4 cancer. She can still approach her situation with words, intellect and wit until they are all leached from her by academic medicine and disease. In the end the puzzles of the Holy Sonnets of Donne do not comfort as much as the simplicity of The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. This is not about melodramatic or philosophical death; there is no distance between deah and the viewer. There is no intellectual defense, but human kindness is a comfort.

Rating:
Summary: Wit is Wonderful!!!
Review: I remember the first time that I saw Wit ....It was awesome and very realistic. Emma Thompson, and Audra McDonald did an excellent job conveying the agony that a cancer patient experiences with enough "Wit" and creativity to make it a very compelling story.

Rating:
Summary: Emma Thompson is Perfect
Review: ...This video is not for the squeemish.....there are several scenes that are almost to hard to watch...and had me in tears.
Is it a GOOD movie?
I can't answer that. But it is a compeling movie....one that will stay with you a very long time.

Rating:
Summary: Publish *and* Perish
Review: Visually, "Wit" is a stunner. Shot in high contrast (by ace cinematographer Seams McGarvey), every detail in the camera's frame is perfectly presented, and nothing is hidden from the viewer. Every fold and wrinkle and twinkle in Emma Thompson's face is laid bare for all to see. The halls of the hospital are spic-and-span clean, sleek and sterile to the point of being heavenly. But they have nothing to do with heaven, really. In fact, the setting is more like a ghostly purgatory, where one woman is caught between life and death.

That one woman is Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor of literature specializing in the enigmatic poems of John Donne, and recently diagnosed cancer patient. In her civilian life she was a contentious, stubborn, and demanding teacher. As a patient she's reflective, intelligent, emotionally repressed, and, of course, witty. I can't imagine another actress pulling off all of these qualities more readily than Emma Thompson. Her English properness combined with her easy drollness fit perfectly into the role. She is able to play the role's 'wit' without batting an eye. What I didn't expect from her was an intense emotionality. Thompson can, at times, be too cold and too calculating in her acting. But in my favourite of her roles ("The Tall Guy", "In The Name of the Father", "The Remains of the Day") her passion valiantly fights through the cold veneer. Such is the case here. Thompson's Dr. Bearing begins the film as a cynical scholar, but she slowly sheds that persona, eventually exposing her emotions like a gaping wound. And it's not just a persona change that she undergoes; she is ravaged physically as well. In the beginning, Thompson sports an elegant head of black hair, speckled with distinguished grey. Her eyes are alive with fire and her face is rubbery and expressive like only Emma can be. But as her chemotherapy progresses, she loses that head of hair, her eyebrows and eyelashes. And she becomes gaunt and sickly. The film has done the impossible: it has sapped Emma Thompson of all her strength and vitality, and boy is that a heartbreaking effect.

The rest of the cast is distinguished, but pales in comparison next to Thompson's perfect performance. They're all insignificant satellites revolving around her Jupiter. Christopher Lloyd as her doctor, Jonathan M. Woodward as his ambitious student (and, in a malicious twist, a former student of Dr. Bearing's; this fact becomes quite embarrassing for her during a routine pelvic exam, that has both the patient and the young doctor cringing in discomfort), and Audra McDonald as a dim but well-meaning and overly protective nurse, all do fine, understated work. They are the recipients of Dr. Bearing's pointed barbs, for she feels used and abused as they treat her more as an object to be studied rather than a person to be cured. The power of 'Wit', however, the thing that elevates it above other patient-vs.-ambitious-doctor films, is that in a way this is turnabout as fair play. For the most part we sympathize with Vivian; how can these educated doctors have such poor bedside manner? But in a quick flashback, we see Dr. Bearing, the professor, with little sympathy for a student asking for an extension. She is cold-hearted in her pursuit of creating perfect scholars, just as her doctors are cold-hearted in using her as a research tool. She used to be the one ruthlessly deconstructing the text; now, she is the text. She used to be the one discussing death in very theoretical terms; now death is staring her in the face, and her scholarly instincts are of no help to her. It's a fascinating dramatic predicament.

Director Mike Nichols (who, with Thompson, co-adapted Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize winning stage play) composes his film of a series of long, static shots. He gets a lot of mileage out of allowing the camera to focus on Thompson's face, until the audience can't take the sight of this formerly beautiful now hideously ravaged woman staring back at them. It can get uncomfortable at times, but that's what makes the film terribly moving. And his use of flashbacks, going back and forth through time several times in the same scene, is used judiciously and effectively. One of the film's most touching moment has Dr. Bearing recalling the moment when she fell in love with words, reading Beatrix Potter books in her father's study (while being coaxed gently on by her father, played by playwright Harold Pinter). Bearing at age six is suddenly replaced by Thompson's Bearing, acting like six, but dressed in her hospital garb and bald head. Nichols never lets these moments become maudlin, and thus they are surprisingly effective.

Oh good lord, this is a touching movie. It spares you nothing, and if you're up for the challenge, you'll be thankful for its trust.

Rating:
Summary: wit
Review: Let's just say, the movie was great.