Review: The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman is not a decent film for a whole range of reasons - which, because they include Sean Penn seemingly cutting off his own dick, I will most definitely be going into later on - but a big part of it is that Mel Gibson is trying to replace how the public sees him with how he sees himself. Last year's Dragged Across Concrete worked in large part because there Gibson was playing an angry racist. Here? He's a living saint.

Based on the true story of how the Oxford English Dictionary came to be, one of the many problems this film has is that while a while lot of things take place, very few of them join up to form a story.  Professor James Murray (Gibson) is a Scottish school teacher who's religious, well-mannered, a loving husband and caring father, and a man passionately devoted to language: who better to take over Oxford university's struggling dictionary project?

Meanwhile, former US Army surgeon turned crazed murderer Dr William Minor (Sean Penn) is acting crazy at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he's been sent after murdering the husband of Eliza Merrett (Natalie Dormer). There he saves the life of a guard impaled on a faulty gate, decides he wants his army pension sent to Merrett to make amens for his crime, and then really gets into helping out Murray (whose big idea to get the dictionary done is to ask the public for help).

Conflicts between director Farhad Safinia (who's had his name taken off the film) and the producers meant this has been sitting on a shelf since 2016, and the end result has some definite rough edges in editing (plus a couple of establishing shots seemingly shot on a handicam from 2004).

But not even a skilled editor could make Penn's massively over the top performance belong alongside everyone else, or change the way that Steve Coogan's character (Murray's biggest supporter) literally just shows up at multiple points to say "I have a cunning plan" and then saves the day via some off-camera scheme. Did I mention Minor ends up teaching Merrett how to read?

It'd be tempting to say the film's biggest mistake comes when Minor - suddenly tormented by his budding romance with the wife of the man he killed - rips a metal strip from a chair and uses it to (tastefully) do something that results in him bleeding profusely from the groin. But does he actually cut off his dick? Whatever he does lop off kills the romance stone dead so it seems safe to guess he's now coming up short in the downstairs department. Did this happen in real life? No. Why did anyone think it was a good idea to put it in the movie? Well, it does star Mel Gibson.

Annoyingly, it's hard to deny that Gibson remains a strong and charismatic actor. He's easily the best thing here as the films moral centre, a man who sticks by his principles, stays true to his friends, consults his wife on all major decisions, clearly loves his children, is well read without being arrogant, is a firm but thoughtful leader and so on and so forth.

But in 2020 the fact that Gibson is an angry man with a dark side he can't hide is so firmly ingrained in the public consciousness - when the public bothers to think of him at all; if being an abusive drunk hadn't killed his career a decade ago his star would probably still be on the wane today - that his warm and kindly performance here feels like the set up for a joke that never comes.

- Anthony Morris