Movie Review

A film by Mike Nichols, starring Emma Thompson, 103 minutes, 2001.

If you like irony you will love this movie! Vivian Dearing (Thompson) is an expert in the poetry of John Donne and a world respected scholar for her uncompromising high standards. She's 'tough'. She also has stage four ("there's no stage five!") metastatic ovarian cancer. The movie is about the course of her treatment, her journey through the indignities and humiliations special to aggressive chemotherapy. Ironies abound. The medical profession is easy to caricature. They hide behind their clipboards and jargon. They're brusque and technical, missing the opportunity for caring human contact, etc. The Resident who directs her treatment was one of her students and took her course because a Humanities was required in Pre-med and 'she had the reputation for offering the toughest course on campus'. He is only interested in Research, extension of Knowledge, exploring the puzzle that is cancer. Unfortunately he's a klutz at the bedside but his are exactly the same values that drive her in her academic career. The very thing she values and stands for frustrates and humiliates her in her illness.

The poetry of John Donne and his ambiguous attitude to Death pervades the movie. The technicalities of renal function, chemotherapies and D.N.R.s reverberate with the lines "Death be not proud, for some have called thee mighty and dreadful. For thou art not so" "And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die." In the early stages of her career Vivian saw this separation of Life and Death by a simple comma as a "Metaphysical Conceit or Wit". "Not wit ", comments her professor, "but Truth". And so is set the great dialogue of the story, between the scientific 'this is all there is and we will preserve it at all cost' view and a faith perspective that "life, death and eternal life" are a continuum not separated by exclamation marks but a comma, a breath.

In a final scene her old professor comes by to see her while she is in extremis. One great Donne scholar offers to read his poetry to another as a comfort. Vivian manages to utter an anguished "no" and so her mentor climbs into bed and reads to her from the children's' story, The Runaway Bunny "a little allegory of the soul. Wherever he hides, God will find him". It is a deeply moving and profound moment that shows the longing for God that underlies our search for reputation, knowledge and certitude.

On the face of it, a movie in which we watch a woman die of cancer doesn't sound like a cheerful evening. But, this is a funny, wry and profoundly theological story. I defy you to watch it with a dry eye.