Starring: Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, Natalie Dormer, Jennifer Ehle, Eddie Marsan, Steve Coogan
Distributor: Transmission Films
Runtime: 125 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2020
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This drama from France, Iceland and Ireland is based loosely on a true story drawn originally from the 1998 book, “The Surgeon of Crowthorne”, written by Simon Winchester. It tells the tale of two men who come together to help compile the English Oxford Dictionary. One was a distinguished academic, the other was a convicted murderer, who was an inmate in a UK mental asylum.
The film has been mired in controversy about who is technically responsible for directing the final version. The direction was taken over by Farhad Safinia before the film was released. Mel Gibson, who stars in the film, sued to prevent the film’s release but lost, and Safinia’s name as Director was replaced by the fictitious name of P.B. Sherman. A lengthy legal battle started when Gibson accused the film’s producers of “jeopardising” the movie, and multiple legal suits followed.
In 1879, Professor James Murray (Mel Gibson) began work to put “order in the world of words” for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. He moved his wife, Ada (Jennifer Ehle) and family to Oxford to try and cope with his assignment. After he began work to compile the words, Murray called for assistance, and invited members of the public to provide input on which words they use, and where they came from. William Chester Minor (Sean Penn) lodged over 10,000 entries, and he did that while undergoing psychiatric treatment at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in the UK. While in a delusional state, Minor had killed a man. He was declared insane, due to the after effects of the American Civil War, and was institutionalised for the crime. When the project fell behind, Murray had no idea that his best helper was criminally insane until he travelled to Broadmoor to thank him personally.
The film is fascinating story-telling about two very unlikely persons coming together. It is a tale of genius and obsession associated with two men who created history by writing the Oxford English Dictionary, which was at that time the most comprehensive dictionary of words ever compiled.
Sean Penn delivers a compelling, but theatrical performance as “The Madman” of the title, and communicates bouts of insanity mingled with periods of rational thinking that inevitably result in immense guilt. Minor’s sense of guilt motivated him to offer money to the murdered man’s destitute wife, Eliza (Natalie Dormer) who, after resistance, accepted his support. Their later romantic attachment to each other provides a subplot that distracts from the film’s main theme.
The film works best when it focuses on the friendship between the two men obsessed with the dictionary project, but it produces some fascinating insights about words themselves. Words, for instance, radically shift their contextual meaning over the years. Alteration in the meaning of words is not a linguistic distortion, as much as it reflects genuine evolutionary change in meaning over time, and Dictionaries record the nature of that evolution.
The film’s treatment of mental illness is radical in its formulation, but arguably defensible. Instead of defining mental illness as a condition permanently associated with pathological behaviour, the film tries to project mental illness as allowing for the expression of rational behaviour between moments, or periods, of disordered behaviour. A person who is capable of behaving insanely may also be capable at other times of behaving normally in an entirely rational way. Such an account plausibly explains the unlikely interactions between a Scottish academic and an Asylum inmate, who was diagnosed as an incurable schizophrenic, but the film succumbs in several places to standard prejudices about severe mental disease being unalterable, and forever unreliable.
This is not a faultless film, but it is an intriguing one. The tone and acting are theatrical, and the scripting associated with its multiple themes is uneven. What best distinguishes the movie is an incredible plot-line about the origin of the English Oxford Dictionary, and this commands attention.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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