Wit

From the Margaret Edson play that deserved its Pulitzer Prize, Mike Nichols has made a television movie that deserves not only an Emmy but our baffled gratitude as well.

A shrewd and triumphant retooling of Margaret Edson's 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit tempers its harrowing tale of an English literary scholar's fierce fight against ovarian cancer with a strong strain of the title trait.

Thompson gives a real tour-de-force performance, moving professor Bearing from bemusement to curiousity, fear to confusion, anger to anguish with skilful subtlety

If you recall the "Paper Chase" (1973) you'll be familiar with the concept of a hard-nosed academic who teaches students with a barely veiled sense of contempt and ruthlessness. Well skip on almost three decades and it's Emma Thompson's "Vivian" who rules her class of English literature students with a similarly unforgiving rod of iron. Then she starts to feel a bit ropey and after a visit to her doctor (Christopher Lloyd) is told she has a metastatic ovarian cancer that is going to need one hell of a brutal chemotherapy treatment if she is to have any chance at all of survival. Attended now by "Jason" (Jonathan M. Woodward) a former pupil who claims to have revelled in her John Donne classes of metaphysical poetry, and nurse "Susie" (Audra McDonald), we follow her increasingly intense and debilitating treatment whilst flash-backing through her own life as a timid academic under the tuition of the equally formidable "E.M." (Eileen Atkins). Aside from those occasional retrospectives, we spend most of the film in her hospital room where she initially delivers something akin to a video diary to the camera - complete with some acerbic observations about her "having a nice day"; but as the drugs begin to take their toll; her hair falls out; her skin turns a jaundiced tone of yellow and the pain starts to kick in, we witness the direct impact of her illness on this woman whose streng…