By Paul Byrnes
THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN ★★
(M) 125 minutes
Mel Gibson walked off this project three years ago, before it was finished. He appears here as the Scottish lexicographer James Murray, founding compiler of the Oxford English Dictionary, only because his lawyers failed to stop its American producers, Voltage Pictures, from finishing it without him.
The director’s name is fictional. P. B. Shemran is really Farhad Safinia, an Iranian who co-wrote Apocalypto with Gibson in 2006. Gibson acquired the rights to Simon Winchester’s book The Surgeon of Crowthorne in 1998, at publication. He was going to direct it himself; then Luc Besson, then John Boorman.
Mel Gibson and Sean Penn in The Professor and the Madman.
All came to nought, but Gibson kept at it. His commitment was like that of James Murray himself, who toiled away in Oxford from 1879 until his death in 1915. In late 2016, with $US25 million spent, Gibson and Safinia asked Voltage chief executive Nicolas Chartier for an extra five days shooting – but in Oxford, rather than Dublin, where most of the film had been shot. Chartier refused, claiming the film was already late and over-budget. Gibson and Safinia sued for control, but lost.
Safinia’s original cut was at least 35 minutes longer than this one. It might well have been better, but that would not be hard. The film is a bombastic dirge verging on the preposterous. The seeds of its downfall are there in the casting – specifically, Gibson as “Professor” Murray (he never was one) and Sean Penn as the madman. Both wear long beards, making them difficult to recognise, but not long enough: we can still see their performances. Worse, we can hear them. Gibson committed foul murder on the Scottish accent as William Wallace in Braveheart 25 years ago. He does it again here, in the worst crossing of the Atlantic since the Titanic.
The film is a bombastic dirge verging on the preposterous.
“We my ulavate Unglish even unto the gits of Heaven,” he cries. Least, I think that’s what he said. Still, Gibson gives full voice to his character, with obvious affection for what Murray achieved, despite the odds. It’s heartfelt. Gibson loves warriors, even if this one fights his battles with pen and ink. Penn gives Dr William Chester Minor, an American schizophrenic, the “mumblecore” treatment, dropping further into the bass notes of his range as Minor becomes more unhinged. Penn’s performance is a carnival of crazy, a showy compendium of ticks and whirrs, the kind that Academy voters often mistake for good acting. When we get to self-mutilation, there’s at least a certain justice.
Minor was a Civil War military surgeon who drifted unhappily to London, pursued by his demons. In 1872, in Lambeth, he shot and killed George Merrett, a stranger, claiming he was pursuing an attacker. Minor was sent to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where he heard about Murray’s dictionary. Murray had appealed for public help to find the earliest quotations for every word in the English language – a mammoth task. The extremely well-read Dr Minor became his most prolific collaborator, contributing notes on more than 10,000 words. The film paints Minor as Murray’s rescuer, delivering much-needed progress when the nasty Oxford dons who commissioned the dictionary are about to give Murray the boot. Sadly, no-one can save Minor as his torment worsens.
Winchester’s story was already remarkable, but not neat enough for Hollywood. So here we have a dramatic scene, many years after the collaboration began, in which Murray goes to Broadmoor to meet Dr Minor, assuming he is a member of staff. The leg-irons give away the truth. In fact, Murray knew well before they met that Minor was an inmate.
Even more remarkable is the film’s subplot, in which Eliza Merrett (Natalie Dormer), widow of Minor’s victim, visits the American in prison – initially in anger, then in forgiveness, as she becomes his friend. This incredible story is actually true, and so powerful that it threatens to overshadow the main line of plot – the friendship of the two men. Such are the problems of adapting a good true story to the needs of stardom. It’s sad for Mel Gibson that this one got away, after so much work. Sadder still for the movie-going public that Winchester’s book ended up in Palookaville – a word that James Murray never heard.