Film Review: The Professor and the Madman
English language history nerds, rejoice.
The Professor and the Madman delves into the origins of the hefty tome that is the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s a tale that’s full of more murder and mystery than you might expect, thanks to the source material, worldwide best-selling novel The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester.
Professor James Murray (Mel Gibson) is a schoolteacher in mid-19th century England. He’s an autodidact with impressive fluency in a myriad of languages and a man with a bold vision: to compile a definitive record of the English language.
It’s an ambitious task to say the least, the Oxford English Dictionary would not be completed until after his death, 70 years later.
But the world of Oxford University is a stuffy one, and Murray’s high-browed peers are none too pleased when he pitches the idea. - Murray doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree to his name!
While overseeing the momentous task of compiling words, a role begrudgingly assigned, he receives help from an unexpected source; a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. This is how we are introduced to none other than Dr William Minor (Sean Penn), a man who has been placed in the asylum after murdering Eliza Merrett’s (Natalie Dormer) husband during a schizophrenic fit.
The Professor and the Madman had its fair share of production troubles, and unfortunately, it shows.
After production company Voltage Pictures refused final cut privileges and additional shooting days in Oxford, Gibson walked off the project, which he’d spent 20 years adapting. Director Farhad Safinia was subsequently scrubbed from the production credits.
The film is hopelessly inconsistent in style, plot, and genre, and feels generally like a half-abandoned effort.
The actors do the best with their material - which at some point must have had hopes of becoming a decent script, but falls flat. There’s some misplaced humour, and a far-fetched love affair between Minor and the widow Merrett. One particular eye roll-worthy moment involves a very young Winston Churchill, who features for deus-ex-machina purposes.
The individual stories of the ‘professor’ and the ‘madman’ take too long to come together, and until they do, they feel like two entirely different films.
Visually, the film is all over the place: cheap-looking stock footage has been used for exterior shots - a relic of the production woes - and it’s a jarring and distracting contrast to otherwise professionally filmed shots.
There are some nice moments handheld shots that should have felt stunning but instead seemed like a wasted attempt to inject energy into otherwise dull dialogue scenes.
It’s not the worst film, but it is a forgettable one.
4/10
The Professor And The Madman will be showing in Australian cinemas nationally from February 20th 2020.