THE SOUL OF 'WIT' THOMPSON OFFERS BRAVURA PERFORMANCE IN HBO ADAPTATION OF PULITZER WINNER.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

``How are you feeling today?''is the banally pleasant query countless medical professionals ask of Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson) during her battle against ovarian cancer in ``Wit.''

She endures it all with a pinched smile concealing a hidden joke, because she knows they're not really expecting a response of honesty or depth, or even any sort of answer at all: How could one possibly feel when struggling against death itself? But it's the sort of semi-pertinent small talk that helps empty a room of the crushing silence that comes with the dread when no more words need be said.

You'll be feeling pretty wrenched after watching ``Wit,'' a crisp adaptation of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Thompson and director Mike Nichols, who hasn't done anything this good in 20 years. It focuses on Bearing, an accomplished if emotionally brittle literary professor specializing in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, whose grapples with the meaning of life and death, as one character puts it, ``made Shakespeare sound like a Hallmark card.''

In the throes of stage four ovarian cancer - she dryly observes, ``There is no stage five'' - she endures a brutal series of treatments with a droll fatalism that carries her, and the viewer, through an often agonizing process. After retching into a container, she collects herself and addresses her audience: ``You may remark that my vocabulary has taken a turn to the Anglo-Saxon.'' Lying in her hospital bed, she grouses good- naturedly to the viewer, ``If you think eight months of cancer treatment is tedious for you, consider what it's like to play my part.''

Her doctor (Christopher Lloyd) and his clinical researcher (Jonathan M. Woodward) merely consider Thompson's character a receptacle for research - they want to pound her through as much abrasive chemotherapy as Bearing can bear and tally up the numbers once she's dead. (Bearing once had the researcher in her toughest course: After he gives her a pelvic examination thoroughly lacking in bedside manner, she muses, ``I should've given him an A.'') One nurse (Tony winner Audra McDonald) shows her the kindnesses Bearing needs but, as we see in flashbacks, didn't necessarily shower on her own charges.

We see the love of language instilled in Bearing in flashbacks blurring past and present, as bald and in her hospital gown she interacts with her equally stern mentor, E.M. Ashford (Eileen Atkins) and her father (playwright Harold Pinter). The centerpiece of her scholarship is, suitably given the circumstances, Donne's ``Death Be Not Proud,'' which Ashford insists she has interpreted in too sentimental a fashion.

In the end, however, the film suggests that sentiment is all we have left. When the clock is running out, when the life of the mind is withering, childish sentiment will do quite nicely, as conveyed in a moving scene in which Ashford visits Bearing gasping her last in the hospital and reads to her from ``The Runaway Bunny.'' ``Ah, look at that,'' Ashford says, wryly teaching to the end, ``a little allegory of the soul.''

As, of course, is ``Wit.'' Thompson, predictably enough, is a marvel as Bearing puts on her brave, wry face against an increasingly hopeless situation; a performance of this emotional range is rarely managed in television (or films, for that matter). ``Wit'' is that rarest of rarities: an intelligent tear-jerker.

``WIT''

What: Adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a terminally ill literary scholar.

The stars: Emma Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Atkins, Audra McDonald, Jonathan M. Woodward, Harold Pinter.

Where: HBO.

When: 9 tonight; also Tuesday and April 1, 4, 9, 14 and 17.

Our rating: Three and one half stars

Wash original 'South Pacific' right out of your hair

``South Pacific'' may be one of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's most celebrated musicals - in fact, with songs like ``Some Enchanted Evening,'' ``Cockeyed Optimist,'' ``I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair'' and ``Bali H'ai,'' it's one of Broadway's all-time best - but its 1958 film version was roundly considered a misguided flop.

You name it, people groused about virtually every aspect of the movie, but the thing that hacked off audiences the most was the stupid color filters director Joshua Logan employed to enhance the mood of some scenes. It's a classic go-figure - the guy ships his cast and crew to Hawaii for gorgeous scenic vistas, then muddies up the scenery with his artsy-flatulentsy color filters. Logan himself eventually conceded the gambit was misguided.

At any rate, this means that ``South Pacific'' has been crying out for another film attempt, and ABC thoughtfully complies, with nary a color filter in sight. Lavish and ambitious by TV standards, this version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's ``South Pacific'' is agreeable if occasionally, as our heroine might put it, ``as corny as Kansas in August.''

Improbably based upon James Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning book ``Tales of the South Pacific,'' the musical takes place on a remote island during World War II, where the Navy has established a base to ward off the Japanese. Though a battalion of sailors bellows ``We ain't got dames'' in the opening number, romance seems to blossom easily enough. Nellie Forbush (Glenn Close), a Navy nurse, falls for the exotic Frenchman Emile de Becque (Rade Sherbedgia), a local plantation owner, while Marine Lt. Joe Cable (Harry Connick Jr.), who's on a secret mission and in love with his gal back home, goes gaga for the native Liat (Natalie Mendoza), whose mother, Bloody Mary (Lori Tan Chinn), virtually pushes on him.

Funny how, in the year 2001, audiences can buy gravity-defying heroes spinning dizzily in the air and alighting atop bamboo trees and we accept that a naked fat guy can whoop a handful of former military heroes in a survival contest in the wild, but we're resolutely incapable of coping when a seemingly normal person just walking along breaks into song. The effect just seems too jarring anymore; it takes us out of the story, at least until we get used to it.

Somewhat audaciously, director Richard Pearce (who made the no-brain thriller ``No Mercy'' and the earnest social dramas ``The Long Walk Home'' and ``A Family Thing'') threatens to exacerbate the situation by making everything - the sets, performances and overall tone - naturalistic rather than heightened in any way. His performers don't turn toward the camera and belt out their tunes; they gaze intently, determinedly, into one another's eyes. You'll either buy it or you won't, and if you love the music, you'll buy it. He also includes a few graphic glimpses of the fruits of war, which is jarring opposite the music's largely sunny mood.

One piece of casting that might be hard to accept, on the other hand, is Glenn Close's wide-eyed, golly-gee Nellie, who's supposed to be a naive girl from the sticks. (Mary Martin, who originated the role on Broadway, was considered at age 45 too old to star in the '58 film, though her fans refused to accept her replacement, Mitzi Gaynor; Close today has a couple of years on Martin at the time.) There's no faulting Close's alternately energetic and subtle performance, but she's obviously too sophisticated and mature to be saying things like ``Sometimes the moon's so bright at night, it seems like day'' or warbling couplets like ``I'm stuck like a dope/with a thing called hope.''

Connick, like John Kerr in the movie, seems a little mopey for his part. Still, the locations and the music are pretty as a distraction. ``South Pacific'' still seems to cry out for a definitive film incarnation, but this'll do in the meantime.

``SOUTH PACIFIC''

What: Rodgers and Hammerstein's beloved musical comes to TV.

The stars: Glenn Close, Harry Connick Jr., Robert Pastorelli, Rade Sherbedgia, Lori Tan Chinn, Jack Thompson, Natalie Mendoza.

Where: ABC (Channel 7).

When: 8 p.m. Monday.

Our rating: Three stars

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) Emma Thompson stars in - and helped adapt the screenplay for - HBO's version of ``Wit,'' directed by Mike Nichols.

(2) Navy nurse Nellie Forbush (Glenn Close) falls in love with French plantation owner Emile de Becque (Rade Sherbedgia) in a new version of ``South Pacific,'' Monday night on ABC.