Madman a pleasant surprise
The Professor and the Madman (M, 124 mins)
Directed by Farhad Safinia
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★1⁄2
The Professor and the Madman arrives in our cinemas with a hell of a backstory. Although the film was shot and mostly completed in 2016, release has been delayed for more than two years while producer and star Mel Gibson fought to prevent it being shown.
Gibson and director Farhad Safinia (the film is now officially credited to a fictional pseudonym) both walked over a dispute about filming at Oxford University.
Trinity College in Dublin, which looks fine and provides better tax breaks, stands in for Oxford on the screen. But Gibson insisted that some scenes had to be completed where they actually occurred.
So I went into The Professor and the Madman quite prepared to see an absolute fiasco.
Films from which the director and star have both quit have provided me with some of the greatest unintentionally hilarious nights out of my life. And I was secretly kind of hoping The Professor would yield another.
But, ironically, the film turned out OK. In fact, I reckon Gibson is the real mad man here, for refusing to support what might just be his best performance in years.
Gibson plays James Murray, the auto-didact who took over the reins of what would become The Oxford English Dictionary. Murray was a Scot, not of the academic establishment at all and lacked even a basic university degree. But he was fluent in a dozen languages and competent in a dozen more. He had an astonishing mind, a relentless work ethic and a profound belief in the importance of the task.
Murray’s master stroke was to democratise the creation of the dictionary. Posters went up in every library and book shop, asking for the public to contribute definitions and – essentially – references, for every one of the halfa-million or so words the English language had found room for.
And one man, writing from an address in Crowthorne, in Berkshire, sent more than anyone else. Dr William C Minor eventually contributed to 10,000 entries in the dictionary.
Murray, astonished by this deluge of epistles, travelled to Crowthorne to meet the doctor and was amazed to find his ‘‘learned friend’’ was incarcerated in Broadmoor Asylum, after murdering a man in London years before.
The friendship these two men forged – and the even more unlikely friendship between Minor and the widow of the man he killed – is the story The Professor and the Madman is here to tell.
And, despite some major reservations, I enjoyed it. The dialogue is nowhere near the standard the story demands, events that unfolded over 30 years or more are compressed into a tenth of that time and there is a regrettable amount of invention to flesh out what was already a pretty remarkable true story.
But Gibson and Sean Penn (as Minor) are in stirring form, emoting their hearts out and – Penn particularly – smashing every word to the baseline.
A procession of grey beards explaining the plot to each other doesn’t always make for engrossing viewing, but in its better scenes, The Professor does undeniably come to life.
In support, Jennifer Ehle doesn’t really have enough to do as Murray’s long-suffering wife Ada, while Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) goes the full Eliza Doolittle as Eliza Merrett, the widow of the man Minor murdered. Steve Coogan, Eddie Marsan, et al, round out a decent rolodex of Brit thesp’ reliability.
Expecting not much, I walked out of The Professor and the Madman happy enough to have seen it.