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List Price: $9.98 | | Label: Hbo Home Video
Salesrank: 1725
Released: September 11, 2001 |
| Our Price: $4.00 |
| Used Price: $3.86 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
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 the day comes when they are taken don for her. Diagnosed with a devastating illness Vivian agrees to undergo a series of procedures that are brutal extensive and experimental. For eight months her life must take an uncharted course. No longer a teacher but a subject for others to study. Vivian Bearing is about to discover a fine line between life and death that can only be walked with wit.Running Time: 99 min.System Requirements: Running Time 99 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: PG-13 UPC: 026359178122
Description of Wit:
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
Wit Reviews:
Fair Entertainment but Great Movie 
2008-08-16 - This is not a movie one watches for the enjoyment of it but rather to gain experience and insight. I would recommend it to people curious about what one faces when diagnosed with terminal illness, English enthusiasts, and people curious about experimental filmmaking. The acting was superb. Emma particularly never disappoints.
Not Funny 
2008-06-18 - Maybe I have not been fair as I did not watch all this movie, finding it depressing. Speaking for myself, don't like movies about sickness though admit there are many inspiring stories where people have triumphed over illness. Just not my bag.
Amazingly moving movie 
2008-03-04 - I applaud Emma Thompson for her breathtaking role in this moving portrait of a terminal cancer patient. Amazing. I cried at the scene where her old mentor read the children's story to her. Wit is what movies are supposed to be.
Cold and stagy
2008-03-02 - I feel like a bit of a Philistine giving a middling review to a film which is so deeply moving to so many other reviewers, but it just didn't do it for me. Emma Thompson gives a wonderful performance as the English professor dying of ovarian cancer, but the film as a whole seemed rather cold. The only scene that really moved me was the one in which her old teacher and mentor came to visit her, sitting in bed with her and reading a children's book.
Wit is one of the best movies you can watch on the meaning of life.
2008-02-02 - Why Emma Thompson did not win an oscar for this performance is beyond comprehension. This movie is basically a one-actor performance with some accents well performed by others. The range of emotions Emma's character goes through and the authenticity to which she express content, harshness, wit (of course), fear, pain sadness is phenomenal. Dont watch this for a feel good experience, rather a moment to delve into yourself, if you dare.
All this is coupled with the haunting Avro Part's Spiegel im Spiegel music and the beautiful poetry of John Donne.
