wit
Wednesday, March 28, 2001

wit (HUMOUR) noun [U] 
the ability to use words in a clever and humorous way

She has an infectious smile and a ready/sharp wit. He is a born politician whose speeches crackle with a dry, biting wit. Her conversation sparkled with her own subtle blend of wit and charm. His caustic/cutting/savage (=cruelly clever) wit comes through strongly in his writing.

A person who is skilled at using words in a clever and humorous way can be called a wit. Sydney Smith, a notable wit, once remarked that he never read a book before he reviewed it because it might prejudice his opinion of it.

---Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Cambridge Dictionaries Online.

No week should contain both Kindred and Wit. It's almost more than you can bear.

Say what you will about Emma Thompson -- she sometimes has a mannered style that doesn't work for many people -- but she is utterly phenomenal in HBO's Wit.

The script, based on a one-person play, is incredible. For this, as well, Emma Thompson deserves much credit; she adapted the source play, along with Mike Nichols, the director. Judging from this and Sense and Sensibility, she has something of a feel for literary adaptations. And this is quite literary. Vivian Dearing is an English professor, teaching John Donne to students, many of whom don't want to be there. She's brilliant, incisive, and periodically vicious and merciless to her students, to people who come to her for knowledge and receive instead complex symbolism and language, having no respect for them, not really seeing them as people.

Then she develops ovarian cancer, not discovered until a very advanced stage. And she's entered into an experimental protocol for extremely aggressive treatment. And she discovers what it's like to be the recipient of treatment by brilliant, incisive and generally merciless research physicians who don't respect her, who speak in complex symbolism and language. And, like her students, she learns what she must to understand what they're talking about.

The script is extremely deftly handled. After all, that sort of reversal of fortune is frequently handled with all the subtlety of the Anvil Chorus. And, to be sure, there are moments that are so incredibly obvious that they virtually scream at you.

So she tells you about them. Talks to you about them. The central conceit is that she talks to the viewer as if you were one of her students, as if this were one of her lectures. Life and death--her life and death--as a literary lecture. She points out to you the periodically inescapable irony and paradox ... then notes that it would generally have been too difficult for her students to grasp.

The story is aptly titled. It is an exercise in true wit, in all the senses noted above. By turns ready and sharp, dry, caustic and biting, aimed at her students and herself.

The sort of production that makes having HBO worthwhile.

As an aside, the HBO web site for Wit is very impressive in its own way. A quiet (thankfully, literally) and understated use of Flash, it has information on the cast and crew, as well as information about and poetry by John Donne. The author of the original play, Margaret Edson, writes about watching the transformation from one-person piece to multiperson film, worrying about how it would be changed, whether it would be left meaningfully intact.

The site itself is worth a look, even if you don't see the film.

© 2001 Iain Jackson, after-words.org

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