Wit Movie Review

Well, it's easy to see why this was a straight-to-cable production and not a theatrical one. The entire running time of the movie is concerned with one character's battle with severe ovarian cancer and the experimental treatment she is given. In fact, Emma Thompson is hairless after about 20 minutes. When she's not endlessly bemoaning the irony of the treatment -- the drugs are killing her, not the cancer -- she's reciting poetry (the character is an English professor). Morbidly depressing and hopeless, which is pretty much Mike Nichols has been obsessed with lately, the movie is staggeringly real but hardly what anyone would call "entertainment." Harrowing.