Review of Wit (2001) by Jerry W — 06 Jul 2005

In [b]Carnal Knowledge[/b] and [b]Wit[/b], Mike Nichols succeeds in doing what he always does, and that is to create interesting characters within compelling dramas. For [b]Carnal Knowledge[/b] he offers us two college friends (Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel) whose sexual lives peak at the same time with the same girl (Candice Bergen). The unconfident Garfunkel falls for her first, making himself comletely vulnerable to her, but she never really falls for him. Bergen enters a romantic relationship with him but only to maintain the spiritual one they have. She gives him everything except her sex, yet that is the one thing Garfunkel wants. She gives her sex to Nicholson's character, but not her everything. And that's the one thing he wants. Eventually Nicholson and then Garfunkel break it off with this enchantress.

They spend the rest of their lives, their sex lives, suffering from this loss. Nicholson becomes a lawyer who's given up on finding a spiritual connection; he's only interested in sex. Garfunkel becomes a doctor who continues to search for the emotional bond he had with Bergen, but foverlooked when he had it. The film is realistically tragic, perhaps too much so. Bergen fills the role of feminine ideal well, at once utterly confounding and irresistible to men.

[b]Wit[/b] is darker still, taking on a subject that is even more confounding than love: death. Emma Thompson helped co-write this stage adapted HBO film with Nichols and it shows. So much of the story, which chronicles the slow decline of an English English professor (She's British) dying of late stage ovarian cancer, is delivered by Thompson's narration and what is an extended soliloquy. Making such extensive use of a stage device makes some film purists snicker, asking who wants to watch a movie where a woman just talks to the camera the whole time. Well, when it's this funny (witty even), I do. Thompson's character prides herself on her uncompromising approach to everything: 17th century metaphysical poetry, her students, and life in general. Dying of cancer is perhaps the one challenge that she wishes she could find some compromise in. But death is even more uncompromising than she is.