MS Speaks

Wit, starring Emma Thompson, is not a movie to watch if you want something to cheer you up.


https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243664/


She plays Vivian Bearing, a highly respected literature professor who at 48 is diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  She has been told that the cancer may be too advanced for there to be much hope, but she undergoes a gruelling series of treatments.


When they don't work, she has to come to terms with her imminent death.


The title refers to the poet John Donne's use of wit in his writings. Vivian is an authority on Donne, and the movie includes several passages from his poetry and prose, worked into the story.


A viewer might wonder why such a movie was made. We see Vivian's suffering, which is extreme. Sometimes she addresses the audience. Usually, though, she is shown interacting with the younger of her two doctors, Jason, who happens to be a former student of hers, and with Sue, her nurse, who is African-American.  There is a brief encounter with her own former mentor, an older woman who pays her a kindly visit in the hospital when Vivian is nearing the end.


Aside from these people, Vivian seems quite alone. Since we know from what she has said and from what Jason has said about her that she was quite prominent in her field, one has to wonder why former students and colleagues aren't at least coming around to visit, but maybe academics don't visit the sick?


These are quibbles, however. Emma Thompson gives a magnificent performance in what must have been a difficult role, to put it mildly.


One scene was jarring because it seems to be racist. Vivian, who, in one of her monologues, has harked back to a time in her childhood when she learned the word "soporific," uses that word when asking Sue, her nurse, a question--about whether a medicine has a soporific effect. Sue replies, "I don't know about that but it makes you sleepy."  Then Vivian somewhat condescendingly reveals to her that "soporific" means that it makes a person sleepy and laughs at her. Sue obligingly joins in the laughter but, especially because Sue is African-American (and even if she hadn't been), the exchange comes perilously close to portraying Vivian as limited by the sort of elitism that has given academics and some intellectuals in general a very bad name.


However, there are still good reasons for seeing this movie. If a viewer has been vague about what those "DNR" orders mean--the DNR order a person is asked to choose or not choose when filling out end-of-life care documents, this movie should clear the question up, at least somewhat.


Some of the scenes in this film will surely make people wonder about the advisability of having as much medical care as we now have at our disposal.


Just because it is possible to keep someone alive by using extraordinary life-saving measures doesn't mean that we should always do that.  The movie makes the point that doctors often believe firmly in preserving life at all costs but it argues persuasively in favor of sometimes letting nature take its course.