Wit, the Movie ~ Creative Engagement -Donne

(Sorry for the late post!)

            Wit is a movie that was recently released by HBO from the early 2000s. We follow the main character, Vivian Bearing, as she goes through eight weeks of intensive treatment for stage-four ovarian cancer. As we know from the clip we watched from class, Vivian is a literature professor in seventeenth century poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. She spends the entire time in the hospital reciting many different poems by Donne, as she has no books with her because after her periods of treatment, she is sent back home.

            Not only is this movie about John Donne and the witty, albeit frightening, professor, but human compassion. Constantly there are interesting flashbacks throughout the movie, as we saw in the first clip, of memories she has in her past of literature and studying John Donne. One clip she goes back and watches herself yell at a football player who’d fallen asleep in the front row. She had given no mercy to her students; she told the student to either excuse himself or come prepared for class. Reflecting upon the scene she says “I didn’t say, ‘You are so young. You are nineteen years old; you wouldn’t know a sonnet from a steak sandwich.’”

            The movie is full of interesting and biting lines from both her and another character, Jason, a Fellowship doctor who was one of Vivian’s former students. He rather poetically described how cancer cells survived and spread. At one point, my second favorite line after the line above, he says “…Donne. He makes Shakespeare look like a Hallmark card.” I would have never thought to put it like that.

            I love poetry, and I do not have a disdain for sonnets as I have seen other students have, but I will admit I had never heard of nor read John Donne before I took this class. Honestly, the repetition of the poems in the movie made me mull over the sonnets quite a lot more than I thought I would have originally. It gave them new meaning when they were repeated over and over out loud; and the point that the punctuation made all of the difference made me think more on how much certain texts may have changed over time and lost their meaning.

            As for the second clip we watched for class, which our professor described as “poetically disturbing”, there is much more that needs to be seen and said about it. If you watch the movie, the most intense scene happens right before that ending part in which Vivian recites her sonnet. It was quite fitting how she recited it after what happened. Now, I don’t want to give more away than I already have, but I do want to say that if you have any interest in literature and witty movies, this is a good one. Yes, it’s tragic, but it holds a lot of deeper meaning; I was struck when it ended, breathing “wow”. I don’t do that often. I felt inspired. I felt as if I needed to read more Donne. I felt as if I didn’t really know the meaning of life and death. I felt very, very small. It was an amazing feeling; it felt as if it was an epiphany moment. It’s a powerful movie. And if you only skimmed my rumination-length creative engagement (which is posted later than I intended) then all I have to say is: watch Wit. It’s worthwhile to do so.