The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, August 02, 2020

10:00 AM | The Film Meme No. 99

[99th of 100]. If you told me before there exists a compelling drama that combines beautifully, and with such surprising humor, the following disparate things -- cancer, the holy sonnets of John Donne, proper bedside manners, the precision of words and punctuation, the exquisite use of Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel," and the rigors of teaching and research -- I would insist on the impossibility of the project. How can those things cohere into an acceptable story? But it does exist, in Margaret Edson's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which Mike Nichols adapted into a beautiful film for HBO in 2001. It's indeed made for cable television, but it has the weight of the cinematic and the craft of exemplary filmmaking, it deserves to be on this list. [Roger Ebert did the same, putting it in his list of top 10 films of its year, defying the technical consideration that this is a TV movie.] I'm not sure how exactly I came across it -- perhaps I was reading Ebert's ecstatic review for it, and was intrigued? It must have been such a huge curiosity in my part because I actually ordered the DVD of it on Amazon, waiting out the months it crossed the Pacific, to my enjoyment of it finally at home. But here is the thing: I'm a paranoid hypochondriac who believes every year I get to live to be my last year -- such is my mad tango with mortality -- and I generally avoid medical movies like this. I do not like the anticipation of seeing dramas where scenes of pain and suffering are part of the unfolding story, although when I do I occasionally learn to love and admire the best of them -- like Terms of Endearment or Parting Glances or Lorenzo's Oil or The Normal Heart or Safe or The Fault in Our Stars or Cries & Whispers or One True Thing. Mostly, I stay away. So what made me love this extremely dark film that does not shy away from showing the ravages of a cancer-stricken body? I think it is really the film's fierce intelligence, and its superb handling of its medical story by intertwining it with the poetic. Our protagonist, played by Emma Thompson with such assuredness, is Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English metaphysical poetry, who comes to a reckoning with her life when she is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. The film nimbly dips in and out of her past and her present -- as she goes through the comedy of diagnosis and initial hospital visits, and then the indignities of going through aggressive chemotherapy sessions at the hospital, and then her dramatized recollections of her younger self as a child to a linguist father, and as a student to a demanding mentor. All these slip into each other like gentle foldings and unfolding, sometimes intruding into each other, which makes her reassessment of her life -- with the occasional breakage of the fourth wall to address us fittingly -- more like a kaleidoscope of memory, recrimination, and hindsight. And the film's splendid use of poetry is nothing short of miraculous. Earlier on, we get the story's conceit when we get a flashback of Vivian as a college student, visiting her professor to consult on a paper she has written on Donne's "Death, be not proud," and we are treated to Eileen Atkins' Dr. Evelyn Ashford's explication of the poem's weight, with consideration of proper punctuations. Her monologue in full goes:

Begin with the text, Miss Bearing, not with a feeling. 'Death be not proud / Though some have called thee / mighty and dreadful, for / Thou art not so.' You've missed the point of the poem because you've used an edition of the text that is inauthentically punctuated ... You take this too lightly. This is metaphysical poetry, not the modern novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading, which one would apply to any other text, are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. Do you think that the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail? The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life. In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation. 'And Death' capital D... 'shall be no more;' semi-colon. 'Death,' capital D, comma... 'thou shalt die!', exclamation mark. If you go in for this sort of thing I suggest you take up Shakespeare. Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610. Not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads: 'And death shall be no more,' comma... 'Death thou shalt die.' Nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life from life everlasting. Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause. In this way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God, past, present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semicolons. Just a comma. Life, death, I see. It's a metaphysical conceit, it's wit.

Beautiful tying up of all of the film's themes all done in the singular act of academic teaching. As an English teacher, I responded to this with so much heart. But beyond the poetry and its wrangling with mortality, I also appreciated how the film dared allow itself to plumb into the private fears and regrets of someone lying in a hospital bed alone. It does not shy away from the scary, but it remains empathetic, and in the end I find the entire thing deeply courageous. What's the film?

For the introduction to this meme, read here.

Labels: film, health, medicine