Mike Nichols Film Wit Director

¶ … Mike Nichols Film Wit

Director Mike Nicohols' film, Wit (2001), is an amazing film, which takes place almost entirely in a hospital room where the main character, Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson), is dying from terminal cancer. The viewer soon realizes that there is a correlation between Vivian's own poise and demeanor and that of the setting she finds herself in: a cold, austere, clinical, hospital room where those who attend her, with the exception of one nurse, fail to make the healthcare worker to patient connection that is necessary to sustain the dying patient.

Vivian was a Professor of English at a prestigious institution; she was good at her job. Perhaps she was even perfect at it. So perfect, in fact, that she was operational, like the machines she now was being subjected to, the invasiveness of those insights into her own body, much the same as she taught her students. She pried through their outer layers of self-absorption, their mundane thoughts, to their raw emotional nerves and forced them to feel the literature and prose that not only knew like her own hand, but lived in her own life. Lived it to the point that she excluded all others, even her students', overrunning their humanity that she felt was far inferior to the words and thoughts of the literary masters she was trying to help them to interpret.

Her healthcare alter ego is Dr. Harvey Kelekian (Christopher Lloyd). Dr. Kelekian, like herself as a professor, does not give her credit for being able to understand or to be able to comprehend what is happening to her body. Thus, he takes no time to connect to her as a human being. Kelekian brings in a group of interns, who, like him, and like Vivian, have trained their selves to be immune to the emotions of those people who are seeking their knowledge and expertise. Better yet, those people who must seek Vivian's, or her doctor's guidance, even though it is not what they ultimately seek for their own lives.

This is highlighted by the shift in power. Vivian now finds herself in the hands of a young intern, Dr. Jason Posner (Jonathan M. Woodward) who was once her student. Now the power is the intern's, and he has the choice to use his power compassionately; or in the same way as Vivian used hers when she refused to forgive the young student's need to be late with an assignment. It brings the viewer to the thought: Does the professor (healer/physician) want to be known as the brilliant one, the one with the unquestionable and utmost knowledge; or does he (she) want to be known as the brilliant healer (professor) because he (she) uses their own brilliance to bring about brilliant results in their students (patients)?