Kevin Dolan
The Professor and the Madman is about having a friend online who is very bright, and fascinating to talk to, but who will never kiss a girl or hold a job. You would like to help him, but there is no helping him.
It’s sort of like a stage play, or an anime, in that you don’t really get “sucked in” — you are always aware that you are watching actors act, you can tell exactly what they want you to feel — and whether this bothers you or not is probably a function of how much you want to feel that way.
If the critics are mad about a movie like this (The Passion of the Christ, Death Wish), they tend to call it “didactic” or “clumsy” or “manipulative”; but when they Officially Approve (Nanette, The Last Jedi), they call it “earnest”. Audiences virtually always revolt against the critical opinion in these cases, which suggests that the power of regime media is limited, and that may warm your heart a little.
Anyway yes, there’s a lot of good you can find in this movie, if you’re willing to cooperate with our friend Mel Gibson and overlook some things.
Mel plays James Murray, the Scottish autodidact placed in charge of compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. After his team becomes overwhelmed by the task in the middle of the A’s, they crowdsource it to the English public. After a while, they notice that a huge number of definitions are coming from an American patient in an English mental hospital (William Chester Minor, played by Sean Penn).
Minor was an Army surgeon during the Civil War, who (it’s implied) was driven insane by the brutality of the war. He killed a stranger in London during a paranoid delusional episode, was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity, and shipped to Broadmoor Hospital. Because he was relatively lucid most of the time (and a Yale graduate with a comfortable US Army pension) they gave him a comfortable double cell with an office and library, with plenty of paper, ink, and a penknife (this will become important later).
The Professor and the Madman is definitely the most sympathetic portrayal of a 19th century asylum for the criminally insane that you’re likely to see. There are some nasty and counterproductive procedures, but everybody from the doctors to the guards is basically trying to do the right thing. Even when Minor becomes unmanageable and violent, the doctors’ response is understandable — and anyway it’s not obvious that it’s much worse than what a guy like him would get today (horse-doses of thorazine, padded rooms, neglect).
After several months of letters from Minor, Murray decides to visit him at the asylum. They geek out together over various English words whose sound perfectly captures their meaning, and find instant, transcendent friendship. It’s probably the most effective scene in the movie — you can remember (if you are lucky) how it feels to share something beautiful with someone, and know that they understand perfectly what is beautiful about it.
Eventually Minor gets in touch with Eliza Merrett, the wife of the man he killed, and prevails upon her to accept his Army pension to feed her family. She slowly warms and forgives him, he teaches her to read, and they begin a fairly implausible romance — the guilt of which causes Minor to descend back into delusion and cut off his dick with a penknife.
In the real history, Eliza Merrett forgave Minor relatively early on, and was in fact instrumental in building his library and connecting him with the dictionary project. There was no romance — Minor gelded himself because he became convinced that he was being abducted every night to Istanbul and forced to sexually abuse children.
The places where they took creative license make a certain amount of sense, but there’s just way too many uninteresting conflicts in this movie.
I’m totally comfortable with making stuff up in a movie like this — it’s just that all of these contrived conflicts confuse and get in the way of the interesting part, which is the relationship between these two men and their war against Minor’s illness. By all means, bring in the doctors, Eliza Merrett, and maybe even Murray’s wife (for like, one scene, at most), to provide perspective and sounding boards to explore Minor and Murray’s friendship — but this movie has nothing interesting to say about class, or linguistic prescriptivism, or “work/life balance”, or academic palace intrigue.
