When you learn that the stars of The Professor and the Madman are Mel Gibson and Sean Penn, it’s easy to make the wrong assumption.
Photo: Screenshot
In fact the earnest Sean Penn is the film’s Madman, while the frequently eccentric Gibson plays the Professor – with a Braveheart-style Scottish accent to boot.
In fact, even the title “professor” is inaccurate. James Murray was a humble school-teacher, one with no degree. He was completely self-taught, and like many autodidacts, he rather overreached himself.
When the planners of the Oxford English Dictionary challenged Murray to show some qualifications, they got rather more than they bargained for.
In 1872, the Dictionary had foundered on its own ambitions. To not only provide definitions of every word in the English language, but trace definitive origins of the words AND offer authoritative time-lines of when they first appeared, seemed beyond Oxford’s scholars.
Hence the arrival of the polymath Murray, who also offered a solution to the most pressing problem – to wit, it was completely beyond the capacity of a few academics.
Murray suggested democratizing the Dictionary – invite the entire English-speaking public to contribute.
But the enthusiastic amateurs often proved as limited as the Oxford professionals. They simply didn’t seem to have read enough – particularly 17th century English literature.
Until one day that all changed.
Anyone who knows the story of Murray and his meeting with a well-educated American doctor called William Minor, has heard it pretty much in this order.
The Greater Oxford Dictionary was a vast undertaking, and was grateful to take any help on offer. But they weren’t prepared for Dr Minor’s situation.
William Minor had been charged with the brutal murder of an innocent man – the facts were indisputable – but was found not guilty for reason of his obvious insanity, and was therefore sent to Broadmoor for the rest of his days.
But his insanity, and his obsessive love of books, proved the very qualities required to tackle endless series of words.
As played by Penn, with a daunting collection of hair-pieces and false whiskers, Minor turned to this monumental task as a way of, in some way, atoning for his crime.
Meanwhile, Gibson dials back his usual melodramatics and offers a restrained and humane James Murray.
The script and direction of The Professor and the Madman are credited to Iranian-born Farhad Safinia, under a pseudonym for some reason. Safinia had worked with Gibson before on the Mayan thriller – yes there is such a thing! – Apocalypto.
It was possibly Safinia’s idea to tell this story in the opposite order to the usual tabloid account.
Rather than building to the shock reveal – famous dictionary written by a murderer! – this film opens on the murder, then explores Dr Minor’s illness and treatment before heading to the cloisters of Oxford.
An intriguing timeline is one sign of a good director, another is a good cast. Many of the supporting actors are familiar for far bigger roles – Steve Coogan, the great Eddie Marsan as a sympathetic guard, and from Game of Thrones, strong performances from Stephen Dillane and Nathalie Dormer.
The story itself is intriguing – aside from the unlikely people involved, who knew how much work went into a dictionary anyway, long before the invention of computers?
And The Professor and the Madman is told with care and decency, as two opposites share their extraordinary love of words.
For all his regular brushes with the tabloids, Gibson, who drove this project for 19 years as both producer and star, is a good, sincere Hollywood film-maker. And the films he backs are generally worth the effort.
As Murray says, addressing the film’s deus ex machina, Winston Churchill no less, people should be judged by their achievements, not how they’re portrayed by the media.
