Seasoned actors hold curious film together
The Professor and the Madman THE Professor and the Madman is a curiosity of a film.
It’s based on a book The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester and it’s been a pet project of Mel Gibson’s for many years.
It’s about the strange collaboration between James Murray, played by Gibson, a brilliant autodidact who left school at fourteen and now is expert in many languages, and William Chester Minor, an American doctor, a survivor of the Civil War, now imprisoned in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum after killing a man in a delusional state.
Murray is being considered for the role of editor of the still nascent Oxford English Dictionary; he’s supported by Professor Frederick Furnivall (Steve Coogan) but doesn’t impress other members of the board.
But Furnivall prevails and Murray and family, his wife is played by Jennifer Ehle in a thankless role, move to Oxford.
Murray’s initiative to include a leaflet in books asking for contributions from the public connects with Minor who begins to send him contributions, thousands of them.
Meanwhile, Minor, wanting to atone for the death of her husband, offers his pension to the man’s widow Eliza Merrett (Natalie Dormer) who initially refuses to accept.
But later, wanting to confront Minor, she is won over by his sincerity and a relationship gradually develops between the two.
The director, Gibson’s collaborator on the screenplay of Apocalypto, Farhad Safinia took his name off the film, it’s now credited to the fictional PB Shemran.
One can only assume it was because of creative differences. One of problems is the relationship between Eliza and Minor, and it’s not easy to make a riveting film about words and their derivation.
Mel Gibson is really fine as Murray and I liked Sean Penn even though he does tend to chew the scenery on occasions. Ultimately the film despite being disappointing in some ways, has an interesting intersection of diverse characters at its heart.