Witty

Last night I had to decide between watching an old man pretending to be Sean Connery pretending to be James Bond or a hospital drama about cancer. Anyone who's seen Love Story or Stepmom or any other of the maudlin made for tv based on a true story tv movies with know that hospital dramas follow the same pattern. A normal life, followed by conflict, followed by cancer, followed by reconciliation, followed by tear jerking scene of the victim dying in the arms of a loved on. The heart monitor goes BLEEEEEEP. The end. But I thought I'd give Wit a chance. It had Emma Thompson and Christopher Lloyd in it, so it can't be all bad.

And it wasn't bad at all. Not the lugubrious soup I was fearing but very intelligent and sad entertainment. It is based on a play by Margaret Edson and directed by Mike Nichols. The story centres around Prof. Vivian Bearing (Thompson), a scholar in the works of John Donne. It charts her life from the moment she agrees to Dr. Kelekian's (Lloyd) experimental 8 month intensive treatment for cancer to her end. Bearing is a tenacious steadfast character. She is sure in her life and in her work. Her students and colleague fear her. She work with a passion for Donne that excludes everything else in her life. Initially she learns the medical terms and is dry and stoic about the whole procedure. "My only defence is the acquisition of vocabulary." she tells us. Words are her life. She comforts herself with the words of Donne and his poems on death. She has no visitors by her bed. As the treatment takes it's toll, her walls shake and crumble. She starts to reveal herself, her past, her regrets, her feelings, no longer able to hid behind the words of Donne. The research staff treat her like she treated her own students. Hard and cold. Bearing finds some warmth in a shared popsicle with a nurse, and eventually her old teacher, as she recites some comforting words. Not Donne, but a children's story. "This is an allegory of the soul" the teacher remarks, "Wherever the soul hides, God will find it." Tired, weary and in much pain, she asks not to be resuscitated when her heart stops, and finally passes.

I love these sorts of things. I love anything bookish and lets me into different chapters of literature. It lets in a glimpse to make you wonder what else Donne has to offer. I love the way parallels are drawn between Donne's metaphysics and cancer. Donne's redemption anxiety, the gulf between what we know and what we believe to happen after death, is complex becomes so knotted and convoluted that the actual puzzle becomes all encompassing. Cancer, we are told, is mysterious and fascinating. It lives and spreads and replicates forever and ever, like not other organism. "So happens after?" the nurse asks the research doctor. He returns a puzzled look. Thompson gives a warm and tender performance. Bearing is strict and sad. Passionate and cold. The viewer grows to like her, but we know why she doesn't have many friends. We are given unprecedented view into Bearing's character as she can talk directly with us, detached from the action. She talks to us as a young girl, as a student and as a lecturer. Toward the end she says smiling "This is the last time I will get to talk to you." The final word does belong to Donne though, as we stare into he lifeless body we hear her for the last time:


Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
- John Donne