Oncologist Harvey Kelekian prescribes various chemotherapy treatments to treat her disease, and as she suffers through the various side-effects (such as fever, chills, vomiting, and abdominal pain), she attempts to put everything in perspective.

The story periodically flashes back to previous moments in her life, including her childhood, her graduate school studies, and her career prior to her diagnosis.

Late in Vivian's illness, the only visitor she receives in the hospital is her former graduate school professor and mentor, Evelyn Ashford, who reads her excerpts from Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny.

They have preserved Ms. Edson's language and intense focus on Vivian's hospital room as she endures eight months of brutal experimental chemotherapy for ovarian cancer.

But Mr. Nichols's visual choices turn this into a fluent, gripping television film...The hospital staff around her is played beautifully by actors who escape the hazards of clichés.

As Jason, a young doctor proud of the A minus he once got in Vivian's poetry course, Jonathan M. Woodward makes his character's callowness and insensitivity believable.

As Susie, the nurse whose total compassion makes her Jason's opposite, Audra McDonald is especially impressive because the character could so easily have been treated with condescension...E. M. Ashford is played with unerring delicacy by Eileen Atkins in a performance that matches Ms. Thompson's brilliance.... [L]et's not pretend that Wit is fun or necessarily soothing; frankly, it is depressing.

"[4] In his July 3, 2008 blog, Roger Ebert recalled naming Wit one of the year's best on his Best Films of 2001 program with Richard Roeper, even though it never opened theatrically.

Club,[6] New York Magazine,[7] Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle[8] and The Wall Street Journal,[9] among others, also praised the film and its performances.