WIT
US, 2001, 99 minutes, Colour.
Emma Thompson, Eileen Atkins, Harold Pinter, Christopher Lloyd, Audra Mc Donald, Jonathan M. Woodward.
Directed by Mike Nichols,
Wit is a fine film but one that is not an easy film to watch, especially if we have experienced a severe illness and hospital for ourselves or for someone who is close to us. It won an Ecumenical Prize at the Berlin Film Festival as well as two American Catholic awards, The Christopher Award and The Humanitas Prize.
It is a profound film, based on Margaret Edsons's play which both delights in and has respect for words, for grammar and for articulating words. As directed by Mike Nichols, it is a close-up of an English poetry professor with incurable ovarian cancer who has agreed to undergo the strongest chemotherapy available as a resource for research rather than for any real hope of remission or cure. As played by Emma Thompson, Vivian Bearing bares her soul to the audience and we share intimately the process of dying by a brave and tough woman. Professor Bearing has taught Metaphysical poetry. The screenplay uses several of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, especially 'Death be not Proud', as a philosophical and religious grounding for the experience of death.
The metaphysical poets, while noted for their love poetry (though this is not mentioned in the film), are concerned about mortality, about immortality, about sin, God's mercy, forgiveness and God forgetting our transgressions. For them, the barrier ('which is not insuperable') between mortality and immortality is a paradox. They explore it as a puzzle but do not 'solve' it.
Wit is a portrait of a life in death.
It is beautifully written: 'Both published and perished!', Vivian says. Other polished phrases will be quoted in this article. It is psychologically sound and insightful.
Wit is a portrait of a teacher, of a woman who looks at life objectively. Vivian's childhood, especially with her father, is glimpsed in a flashback. Her working life is shown in some flashbacks, interviews with her tutor and in her own lectures. But the film is mainly about her experience of dying.
The screenplay speaks a great deal about knowledge, about knowing and knowing more (rather less on understanding). Vivian Bearing has been an academic, a senior scholar, a researcher who lectured (and, perhaps, sometimes taught). She values truth, 'uncompromising scholarly standards making a significant contribution to knowledge'. Words she uses about herself include disciplined, uncompromising, steadfast and 'resolute in the extreme'. In the eight months of her chemotherapy she keeps asking questions, wanting to know what is going on.
Most observers would agree that Vivian Bearing is quite introvered. An only child, single, devoted to her profession rather than to people or another person, she is at home with her own inner life of knowledge and research. Her students have meant very little to her personally - to the student who wants a deadline extension claiming his grandmother has died, she looks up at him and says, 'Do as you will but the paper is due when it is due'. During her treatment she has to go into isolation which she does not find a burden although she begins to reflect on the nature of time as it seems to stand still, a weight, passing slowly yet so scarce.
Vivian Bearing loves knowledge and has a great respect for words. Her illness is insidious, which means treacherous; it is pernicious; she mulls over 'ratiocination', 'coruscation'. However, she ironically has to lapse into American quickspeak in hospital, 'How are you today?', 'Fine.' 'That's great.'
Her approach to poetry is illustrated by her remark that her mentor, Evelyn Ashwood (Eileen Atkins), advised her to start with a text, not a feeling. She asks students to identify devices and processes that Donne used. She lectures on construction of quatrains and scanning. She later remarks that she had liked poems 'in the abstract'. In fact, she had preferred research to humanity. Her course is described as bootcamp where the brain had to be in knots.
The screenplay builds up the comparison with expert Dr Kelikian (Christopher Lloyd) and his young assistant who had taken her course, Jason Posner (Jonathan M. Woodward), both completely dedicated to research and knowledge. Jason explains to Vivian with rapt enthusiasm how he is fascinated by the unstoppable way cancer cells replicate themselves. She herself appreciates 'thorough explanations'.
In facing the reality of her illness and acknowledging how humiliating the poking and prodding of her body by doctors and students, the interminable questionnaires and tests, the agony of a colonoscopy, how degrading it felt to experience a pelvic examination by a former student, Vivian Bearing moves towards some kind of inner peace. Ultimately, in the narrow but realistic confines of the ward, she learns to live more in the present and with more empathy for other people.
She asks Jason about his treatment of people. He breezily and unthinkingly tells her that he did the required course on bedside manner but that it was 'a colossal waste of time for a researcher'. She now realises that what she desperately wants is kindness: 'the senior scholar ruthlessly denied her simpering students the touch of human kindness she now seeks'. When she can't sleep, she confesses that she just keeps thinking but that she is in a quandary, with doubts, no long sure or in control as she always has been.
It is the ward nurse, Suzie (Audra Mc Donald), who is the healer rather than the research experts. Suzie is an African American. She is alert and considerate on the ward but not so well educated. When Vivian (who remembers as a little girl asking her father (Harold Pinter) what soporific meant and remembering this as the moment when she knew she was going to be an academic) asks Suzie whether the medication is soporific, Suzie says she doesn't know 'but it sure makes you sleepy'. The women laugh together at the funny situation.
Vivian knows death is close, at 4.00am on a sleepless night, Suzie explains the emergency options for Vivian when her heart stops. Suzie brings Vivian a popsicle. Vivian gives Suzie half of it. Suzie, who often addresses Vivian as 'sweetheart', reminisces about how as a little girl, she and her friends chased the popsicle van and sat on the kerbs eating them. She deprecatingly remarks, 'That's profound'. Vivian replies, 'It seems nice'.
At the end, Vivian tells the audience, 'We are discussing life and death, not in the abstract, but my life, my death. There would be nothing worse than a scholarly analysis with erudition. Now is the time for simplicity, time for, dare I say it, kindness... I thought that being extremely smart would take care of it, but now I am found out.'
Evelyn visits Vivian at the very end, quietly takes off her shoes and lies beside her, offering to read. She says she will not read Donne but reads the children's story, The Runaway Bunny (including the publishing and copyright details). Gently, she reads the simple story of the Bunny who finds that his true home is at home. 'A little allegory of the soul: wherever you hide, God will find you'. Both Suzie and Evelyn show us the more personal way of being that Vivian, in dying, has discovered.
Evelyn had told Vivian that in the last line of 'Death be not Proud', there should only be a comma, a simple pause between this life and the next, life separated from eternal life by a pause, overcoming the seemingly insuperable barrier between life and death and eternal life...
And death shall be no more, comma, death thou shalt die.
