The Very Air She Breathes
by Sasha Stone

Most of the time, we go to movies to get a happiness patch, a mild dose, but enough to keep us from experiencing the reality of reality.

It's rare that any movie takes you down to the line - to that moment of awareness between what you've decided you can live with knowing and what you'd prefer not to think about. There's so much we shelve, or perhaps give up to God. We spare ourselves that which we cannot face. Dying is at the top of the list.

At first, it seemed like Mike Nichols' Wit, starring Emma Thompson and Audra McDonald, was going to hit theaters, but suddenly it was announced that it would play on HBO. Maybe it was meant to play on HBO all along but I'd never known about it.

Emma Thompson, who co-adapted the screenplay (of Margaret Edson's play) with Mike Nichols, plays Vivian Bearing - a tough-as-nails professor whose life's work was on the poet John Donne. Vivian spent life acquiring knowledge, sacrificing everything else, so that, upon finding out she has advanced ovarian cancer, she must endure the end of her life alone, save a kind nurse named Susie (McDonald). She makes a point to tell us that the cancer isn't killing her - the treatment for cancer is killing her.

Vivian speaks directly to us (the camera) of her experience, from the moment she finds out she has cancer, through a humiliating pelvic exam (where the young doctor exclaims in horror as he probes around her tumor then hurries out of the room, terrified), through her treatment and, ultimately, her death.

When we flashback to moments in Vivian's life, so cleverly done are they, that we see flashes of the young Vivian along with the cancer patient Vivian, with no hair, in a hospital gown, inserted back into her life. What does she have but her past?

Through it all, Vivian begins to understand something about life - that it doesn't matter, in the end, how much you know. Knowledge can't possibly comfort you in death. It's human kindness, it's those bonds we form with other human beings that comfort us when there's nothing left of this material world.

Wit is a hard look at the difference between what we can know and what we are. It is also a hard look at the world of indifferent doctors who care only about advancing medical procedures and care nothing for the patients who must endure them. It is about the beautiful simplicity of a pair of warm arms holding you, or the gesture of a nurse who knows to put lotion on your hands while you're unconscious - not because she has to but because she cares to.

The dazzling moments in Wit are due to the willingness of Emma Thompson to "go there," and to Mike Nichols, who is not afraid to give Thompson the time to breathe in and out the scenes. We all know the Oscar-winning Thompson is capable of great things, but this seems far beyond what anyone could be capable of. Half way through you absolutely forget you're watching Emma Thompson, which never happens.

It's just words someone put on paper that actors then played out. But because it is The Truth it washes off the film of illusion and puts you in a place where the world looks different. One is forced to recognize the power of something so utterly direct.

We're used to seeing people die in movies. But we rarely see a character like Vivian Bearing - a woman who has relied on her grand expanse of knowledge her entire life, who then must face the accidental nightmare of cancer. If your head is screwed on right, and if your heart still beats, you will not be able to watch Wit without needing a cathartic release by the end of it.

It is, perhaps, the ending that is the most beautiful. You never see it coming. And you just barely understand it. Vivian ends as she began - with the primal need for love. She comes to realize at the end of her life, like George Bailey in that Capra movie, that the only thing that matters is how we treat each other.

CineScene, 2001