To End As We Began

Fog
Originally uploaded by chrisbreitenbach.

There’s a lovely scene in Kenneth Branagh’s screen adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing where Emma Thompson, as Beatrice, is perched in a tree languorously sighing:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no mo
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leavy.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

You could listen to Thompson do this sort of thing all day, the way she makes each word sound lazy, ripe and luscious. Contrast that with Keanu Reeves line readings in the same film. Yikes.

In Wit, the play adaptation Thompson co-wrote with its director Mike Nichols for HBO, she plays a professor of John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet, who, like Marvin Gaye, wrestled mightily with sexy secularism and righteous spirituality. (Only Donne didn’t work for Berry Gordy or snort blow.) Her character also has terminal cancer. Thompson acts her ass off, and once again we’re lucky to get some of those ripe and luscious line readings of Thompson’s, this time drawing from Donne’s Holy Sonnets and especially the following from Holy Sonnet X:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death,
though shalt die.

Not as light as Hey nonny nonny, but still thrilling to hear when Thompson recites it.

Wit has many beautiful scenes but it falters in the sentimentality department. The film, which takes some nice albeit blunt shots at the humane deficiencies of our health care system, is for the most part a brutal look at a terminal cancer patient physically and mentally disintegrating before our eyes. This is devastating stuff to begin with, and Thompson’s characterization nicely captures the emotional acrobatics of a woman (her character arc moves from hardened and flinty to desperate and needy) inexorably dying. Unfortunately, at the same time, Nichols and Thompson lacquer on a goopy sheen of twinkling piano and a crassly manipulative final 20 minutes where a former mentor, grandmotherly with age and empathy, fortuitously arrives to tenderly take Thompson’s character, now at death’s door, into her arms and…read her a children’s book about bunnies! It’s like going from unsweetened tea to having sugar cubes ground into your teeth. You’re fighting off both tears and anger at the same time, acutely aware of that there’s something bullying about this need to herald in so much additional emotional padding.