Wit
by Mike Nichols
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DVD details
Actor: Audra McDonald, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Atkins, Emma Thompson, Jonathan M. WoodwardDirector: Mike Nichols
Brand: THOMPSON,EMMA
Writer: Emma Thompson
Writer: Mike Nichols
Producer: Cary Brokaw
Producer: Charles F. Ryan
Producer: Julie Lynn
Producer: Michael Haley
Writer: Margaret Edson
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: 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
DVD Release Date: 2001-09-11
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Hbo Home Video
Product features:
- Based on the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson, WIT features the Academy Award winning actress Emma Thompson in a movie directed by Academy award winning director Mike Nichols. Vivian Bearing is an English professor with a biting wit that educates but also alienates her students. With her teaching and life both rigidly under control, Vivian would never let down her defenses, until
DVD Reviews of Wit
DVD Review: beautiful and interesting movie
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie should be implemented in the education of all kinds of health care professionals. Physicians, nurses, specialists etc.
Emma Thompson is wonderful and you are really getting involved in her emotions, illness, and finally the loneliness .
Furthermore you realize how import the language is to communicate en better understand each other
Great movie!
DVD Review: A Painful Journey
Summary: 5 Stars
I was attending an oncology nursing convention the first time I saw this film shortly after its release. My best memory of it was that it was the most searingly honest portrayal of a person with cancer that I has ever witnessed outside of hospital. It was also the most powerfully honest portrayal of a nurse that I had seen in any media. My recent second viewing only confirmed those impressions.
Wit is based on a play by Margaret Edson who at one time in her life worked as a unit clerk on an oncology ward. This teleplay was written by Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson, both Academy Award winners. Ms. Thompson inhabits the role of Vivian Bearing, a British professor of English, specializing in the poetry of John Donne. Bearing is a brilliant scholar, aloof, and demanding as much of her students as she does of herself. She is both feared and revered on campus. Then she gets diagnosed with Stage IV advanced ovarian cancer and is enrolled in a very difficult eight month course of an experimental chemotherapy regimen. She has never married, has never had children, and has won more rivals than friends in her academic career.
Nearly the whole action of the film takes place in hospital. In transposing the piece from theater to film, the director retains the device of the character speaking directly to the audience in extended monologues. Though not a properly cinematic device, it works perhaps even better here than on the stage because of the camera's ability to frame Thompson's face in close-ups that convincingly capture her deteriorating appearance and her growing desperation.
"Wit" can be defined as a form of intellectual humor. The monologues demand careful listening, part of their power stemming from erudite puns and other language tricks and paradoxes. Wit is also the basis of style in metaphysical poetry such as Donne's, a contemporary of Shakespeare. This "wit' along with Donne's obsession with the intersections of love, death, and religion become central to Bearing's metamorphosis. Over the course of treatment her health declines. The tumor shrinks but metastasizes. She comes to realize that she has devalued love and affection in favor of reason and intellect.
Her doctors are researchers rather than clinicians. They are drawn to the science rather than the art of healing. There are certainly oncologists with more empathy and better bedside manner than seen here. But the portraits are not exaggerated. Their determined, exacting approach to science mirrors Prof Bearing's approach to literature. Of all the hospital staff, it is only her nurse, Susie Monahan, who recognizes and respects the humanity of this dying woman's situation. Actress Audra McDonald (who would be later cast as a physician inTV's Gray's Anatomy) manages to play Susie as an authentic human being without falling to sentimentality or stereotype.
This is possibly Emma Thompson's best screen performance. She is totally convincing as a cancer patient, whether she is enduring intractible nausea and vomiting or hoarsely whispering poetry through a great veil of pain. Having spent two decades working in hospital, I can say that the entire production is very realistic and true. Medical procedures, staff interactions, power differentials in the hospital hierarchy, nurses working to advocate for patients are reflected rather than highlighted as the drama proceeds. The "Grand Rounds" scene would be funny if it weren't so sad. "That was very educational" Bearing says, "I am learning to suffer."
"Wit" remains one of the very best examples of this genre. It is brilliantly informative at both an intellectual and emotional level. I would recommend it to anyone, but especially to anyone close to someone dealing with cancer. For persons with cancer, watching this film can be an enlightening though painful journey of self-exploration.
DVD Review: The Best of Emma Thomson, Bravo!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Her performance makes this movie one of my favorite. Though, this film was not widely known, this surely goes on my top 5 perfomances.DVD Review: Wit
Summary: 5 Stars
Anyone who wants to work in health care or those that already do, should watch this video and see the difference between compassionate patient care and bad.DVD Review: Amazing Movie!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an incredible story about a woman who is diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. We go through with her ("her" being Emma Thompson, the lead actress) as she goes through an experimental 8 treatments with the fullest dose of chemotherapy possible. It's funny, it's beautiful and it will definitely make you cry. It's one of the best movies I've seen in a long time.
Description of Wit
English professor Vivian Bearing reflects on life when she is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer.Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 1-JUN-2004
Media Type: DVD
Deservedly hailed as one of the best films of 2001, Wit makes it clear why top-ranking talents seek refuge in the quality programming of HBO. Unhindered by box-office pressures, director Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson turn the most unglamorous topic--the physical and psychological ravages of cancer--into an exquisite contemplation of life, learning, and tenacious, richly expressed humanity. In adapting Margaret Edson's compassionate, Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Nichols and Thompson open up the one-room setting with a superb supporting cast. But their focus remains on the hospital experience of Vivian (Thompson), a fiercely demanding professor of English literature whose academic specialty--the metaphysical poetry of John Donne--is the armor she wears against the cruel indignities of her cancer treatment. While losing all that she held dear, she reassesses her life as an aloof intellectual, and Wit illuminates her bracingly eloquent and deeply moving struggle for dignity, meaning, and peace at life's ultimate crossroads. --Jeff Shannon
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