THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN: The Act Of Definition

Before 2010, it might’ve seemed absurd to suggest that a drama detailing the mundane formation of Facebook could’ve been translated into a socially-prescient Shakespearean drama that doubled as both a thrilling historical document and a frightening forecast of today’s torrent of social media platforms. This same potential for spinning the past into prestige populist entertainment must’ve been on the mind of Mel Gibson back in the 90’s, who between the infancy of his directorial career and working his way through an accession of trashy hard-boiled programmers, he picked up the rights to Simon Winchester’s non-fiction book The Surgeon of Crowthorne.

Fitting the stranger-than-fiction account of the formation of the Oxford Dictionary as a possible Oscar player for himself, it took a whole 22 years to finally hit our screens, after a deluge of controversy (both on and off set for everybody involved), The Professor and the Madman limps out as a woefully half-baked and overcooked spectacle that mistakes reality for relevance.

Standard Definition

Farhad Safinia (working under the Alan Smithee pseudonym PB Sherman), was the man eventually tasked with bringing the page to screen, a frequent Gibson cohort who co-wrote Apocalypto and at the time, probably seemed like a natural fit to help dramatise the collation of the Oxford English Dictionary. In the late 90’s, a passionate plea for the written word, starring the tenacious pair of Mel Gibson and Sean Penn could’ve hit the blockbuster scene in a big way like Shine did in 1996, but now 24 years on, with both of their professional profiles – and the state of the industry in general – withered considerably, the film is now barely squeaking out a theatrical release, an afterthought to a body of noble intentions.

In the same ways that the frame of a film or a stroke of a paintbrush can transport their audiences to another world, the people of 1872 mostly relied on paperbacks and scripture as portals to take them away; with this frame of mind, Professor James Murray (Mel Gibson, surprisingly not the titular Madman), could be considered literature’s lodestar, a Scottish lexicographer whose linguistic intelligence allows him to be asked by the posh delegates of Oxford to be the editor of the Oxford dictionary, a mammoth proposition that would collate every single word with its definition, context and foreign translations – sourced manually and compiled without a single mistake.

A difficult and daunting task indeed, but not one fraught with any inherently palpable drama; the best Todd Komarnicki and Safinia’s script can muster is Murray’s reserved fixation on the project driving his stock British family (a posse as antique as the furniture) away while he toils diligently in their backyard. The real hook of this story lies with William Chester Minor (an unbridled Sean Penn), a retired army surgeon who, despite the impulsive move from the US to England post-war, never quite left the battlefield. Locked up in an asylum after a murdering a man he believed to be scarred war victim seeking revenge, his bubbling internal trauma finds an unorthodox exorcism when he volunteers to help Murray contribute quotations to his strenuous dictionary stockpiling.

A Bond of Beards

Their dual paths rarely overlap, as Minor’s rehabilitation involves confronting the woman he left a widow, single mother Eliza Merrett (Natalie Dormer). Their brief flings grow from understandable contempt to somewhat flirtatious, a process that doesn’t quite heal him of his sordid past but does sharpen him into someone new. Anchoring the melodrama in Minor’s unconventional reconditioning isn’t surprising, it’s an old archetype that’s been weaved through titles like Lorenzo’s Oil and Birdman of Alcatraz, a classic “man against the machine” narrative that positions these peculiar medical methods as gospel and the long-established models as old and outdated.

The archaic systems are represented by Richard Brayne, incarnated with a genial gentleness by Stephen Dillane, who is the smug Dr. Frederick Hilton to Sean Penn’s Hannibal Lecter. His fleeting chapters of ironically dehumanising Minor in order to find his humanity unexpectantly bring forth the grisly gore that unexpectantly ripples out of The Professor and The Madman overwrought runtime, another signifier of Gibson’s thumbprints that ultimately shaped this rumpled mess. This messy final product says less about the human condition than it does about what drives a man to perform a brutal auto-penectomy on himself (as I warned, it gets graphic).

On the other side of the cell bars sit British icons Steven Coogan and Eddie Marsan, who are saddled with disposable costume roles, adamantly refused any chance to give this film some much needed levity, as the absurdism at the heart of this story should be eagerly exploited, not sternly denied. This grimness seeps into all the film’s stiff joints; the nominal friendship between the Professor and the Madman constantly rings false because there’s never any attempts to warmly develop their intellectual bond; their verbal sparring matches always collapse into feverish whispers of random words followed by bellows of laughter, they sound more like Manchurian Candidate activation codes than a transaction of storied dictionary phrases.

The Professor And The Madman: Conclusion

The formation of the Oxford English Dictionary lays merely anecdotal to the main men accumulating its contents, as The Professor and the Madmen flirts with a flurry of rock-solid topics; the struggle between commerce and cultural significance, the unpredictable nature of treating mental health and the practicalities of actually gathering all the words in the English language without the convenience of modern technology.

The damaging behind-the-scenes struggles that occurred since production wrapped up in 2016 (!) has left scars all over Farhad Safinia’s potentially intriguing period drama, but with Mel Gibson’s unwavering conviction towards this truly weird academic journey, it compels the thought that there’s a better way to tell this story underneath all the rubble.

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The Professor And The Madman will be released in Australian cinemas via Transmission Films on 20th February.