Wit

Professor Vivian Bearing, a scholar of English literature, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer and put on an experimental chemotherapy programme. A woman who gave her life to John Donne's holy sonnets and to precision in language is now inside a system that sees her as data rather than as a patient. Vivian narrates what happens straight to camera. Mike Nichols directed and co-wrote the teleplay with Emma Thompson, who plays Vivian and shaved her head for the role, as actresses had done on stage. The source is Margaret Edson's Pulitzer-winning play. It was made for HBO and released on DVD in September 2001. The adaptation kept the play's language and its hospital setting, with the changes limited to visual adjustments for the medium. It won several Emmys including Outstanding Made for Television Movie and Outstanding Directing, along with a Peabody Award and the Special Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Berlin. Roger Ebert found it both intelligent and heartbreaking, and later wrote that he struggled to watch it again after his own cancer diagnosis. Who it is for: viewers who want illness and death addressed directly, with language at the centre. Who it is not for: anyone who avoids hospital scenes. The film softens none of the examinations, the vomiting or the medical coldness.