“The Professor & the Madman”: The Diction

Release Date：May/10/2019
Genre：Biography/Drama/Mystery
Director：Farhad Safinia
Cast：Mel Gibson、Sean Penn、Natalie Dormer

Viola's Rating：7.5

Many people have read the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but not many know the background story of compiling such tremendous great work. The dictionary itself took 70 years to be finished, and one of the producers of the feature film, Mel Gibson, also spent 17 years to brew this masterpiece. Later after the story shown in “The Professor and the Madman”, English academic, philologist, poet and writer, J.R.R Tolkien, also got his first civilian job working for the OED. Along with “Tokien”, which is going to be released on May 10^th, 2019, “The Professor and the Madman” is going to display the hidden history of compiling the dictionary on the same day.

Based on the 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester, a British-American author and journalist, this Irish biographical mysterious drama is about how Sir James Murray (Mel Gibson) begins work compiling words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid-19th century, and receives over 10,000 entries from Dr. William Minor (Sean Penn), a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

Since the film is about the process making a dictionary, the diction of the lines is no doubt very elaborate, and in order to demonstrate how Scottish lexicographer and philologist, Murray, speaks, Mel Gibson has a dialogue coach during production. From the choice of words and dialogues between protagonists, the audience gets to feel the eagerness they have for “words”.

According to a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher, “Genius lives only one story above madness.” Although in the title, “madman” refers to Dr. Minor, the one who committed a murder and was confined in an asylum, Murray, who insisted on finishing compiling OED with such enthusiasm for words and their origins, was not far from madness either.

After 17 years of research, Gibson has done a great job examining closely at the history. All the details related to Dr. Minor and Murray are included in the flick. For example, Dr. Minor’s hallucination, extreme treatment Dr. Minor received at the asylum, how Murray and his coworkers received harassment due to the fact that Murray didn’t have a university diploma and their speed publishing volumes, etc. Though “The Professor and the Madman” isn’t a documentary, it pretty much provides basic information about the early editors of the dictionary.

Generally speaking, “The Professor and the Madman” seems a little bit too lengthy, but besides the history of OED, it discusses issues such as extreme treatments including lobotomy, human rights of those with mental disorders, one of the very first outsourcing cases and restorative justice. Indeed a motion picture worth pondering on.

Picture Credit: IMDb