The Frame

Wow. It’s getting more and more rare for a movie to affect me so much that I cannot do anything but sit and stare at the screen for minutes after the credits end. That a made-for-TV film would do that, much less one that originally appeared on HBO, is even more surprising. Wit, from the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson, tells the story of an English professor diagnosed with metastatic ovarian cancer who agrees to undergo experimental chemotherapy. Professor Bearing’s academic specialty is John Donne, specifically his Holy Sonnets. The Holy Sonnets are Donne’s struggle with the idea of his own mortality and sin, his crying out to a God who often seems not to hear – in his book Reformation Spirituality, Gene Edward Veith contrasts George Herbert’s Calvinist confidence in his own salvation to Donne’s Arminian uncertainty. I would tell you about the greatest moment in the film, but I don’t wish to spoil it. Suffice it to say that the film isn’t overtly Christian, but you could certainly read it that way, and in this moment most of all. Parts of Wit are difficult to watch–the agony of Bearing’s physical decline is acute and harrowing–but it is well worth it.
Superior