Wit
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DVD details
Actor: Audra McDonald, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Atkins, Emma Thompson, Jonathan M. WoodwardBrand: HBO Home Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
Published: 2001-01-01
DVD Release Date: 2001-09-11
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Model: 91781
Studio: Hbo Home Video
DVD Reviews of Wit
DVD Review: all i ever really needed to learn, was in children's literature about rabbits
Summary: 5 Stars
all we ever really needed to learn was written in the children's books we read when we were young.
soporific
making you sleepy. as in, this movie is not soporific but rather is stimulating and tearful.
The movie is bracketed chronologically by two events.
The first, is when she decides to love words, to revel in them, to be constantly surprised by them.
As a young girl reading a child's book about rabbits, her father teaches her the word-soporific.
And the touching moment, shortly before her death, where her literature PhD mentor reads another children's book about rabbits. (i was disappointed when she didn't leave the book on the table as she left) The old prof knew the meaning of the words, for she offers to recite Donne but wisely ends up reading about rabbits, running from God, and transmogrification.
The movie has many levels to instruct us. but i'm interested in the one about words, their meanings and how we share those meanings with those around us.
For she learns, well, the lessons of literature. she knows all the right words about the metaphysical poetry of John Donne ( i spent more time online reading Donne, then the length of the movie, having stopped it everytime she quotes him and reading the whole work) but she really doesn't know the meaning until she dies by inches as an experimental research patient for a chemotherapy for metastised ovarian cancer.
She knew the word-soporific from childhood, but it took the humiliating experience in the hospital to teach her what restful, dreamless, needful sleep was.
she knew what it meant to be a difficult and demanding professor, but her course was described as less poetical than biochemistry as the young really bright doctor inserts a cathater. She learns, a teaches us, in part, the difference between knowing the meaning of a word and experiencing the word in your soul.
Ever the teacher and prof to the end, her monologues directed to the watcher, share what she is learning as she is dying. Sharing her humiliation, her powerlessness, her vulnerability, by stages, the move slowly pulls you into her dying and involves you as her life never involved anyone. For she lived and died, really alone, only the one visit from her mentor in more than 8 months. But she recited her poetry, she quotes Donne through the pain and the haze of the medication, and she really learns the meaning of his words about death and dying and commas.
Commas, pause, just a small breath. Just a short life. It starts with a flashback scene with her mentor and her as a young bright (lots of bright alienated people, actually everyone but the nurse is, bright and not very human, not very caring, not sympathetic to the travails around them, many of which they cause) and a discussion of a comma. The point is that words and punctuation matter, but what matters more is the meaning, the significance, how things really fits together after all the mediocre is burned away. And that is the great strength of this movie, the details (i left all the lights on) that we use to fill our lives to overflowing, to soporific ourselves from others and from our own souls, is stripped away, like her hair, her dignity in a rough pelvic exam, and in death as her breasts are exposed and people fight over the meaning of DNR(not even a word but merely an acronym, a collection of letters, not even dignified with a vowel so that people pronounce it rather than just list the letters).
Emma T. is simply wonderful, she captures the part, and drives the pathos home with just a single tear, or an infectious laugh, or a feeble tug to cover herself. the power and intensity of the movie owes much to her abilities, as much as the movie pulls you into her world and her last days of thought, it also ought to ask questions not only about the matter and indignity of her death, but more about how such a bright, hard working women missed so much of the meaning of Donne.
Mechanism, clockwork instruments, literature as analysis of technic or words as sounds. What is missing is the deeper, more human, more soulish, more spirit level. Her mentor got it, maybe it can just come with age. Which reminds me that we really live our lives backwards. We ought to start out old and infirmed and dependent and get younger and more vigorous with time. Youth is wasted on the young, they don't get it, and when some of them do, it is often too late to do anything about the direction of your life. But like WIT said, he was so young, so immature, it was no wonder that he didn't understand. But those few geniuses, those who tower above our common lot, like Donne, ought to have such a place of honor in our society that young people do hear what they had to say. But as a prof, Emma T's character, despite the intensity and accuracy of her classes, did not challenge the spiritual condition of her students, any more than Donne challenged her own spiritual journey. Like the doctors who "treated" her, she was a technican, only with words rather than with drugs or a scapel, but the effect is the same, both on the doer and the one done to--impersonalization, technic raised high above goals, lostness and concentration on the little things, inhumanity and neglect of the spiritual dimension. In this way, she was just like them, just in a different field. she treated her student's pretty much like the doctors treated her, one more step to the next paper, another paycheck, another acronymn after your name. This is the real shame of the movie, a culture of instrumentality, of means, subplants and substitutes it's own goals for human goals of development and beings and understanding. Not just in the hospital, but in the university and by extension everywhere.
I like to think that this is the big picture of the movie, something we all ought to get, and sooner than our last days.
Perhaps reading more John Donne will help, as long as we don't concentrate on the sounds of words, but on the meaning and what he really wanted us to hear and take to heart.
"O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?"
"No man is an island. entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. "
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