Film Recommendation: Another Mel Edition
You should go watch The Professor and the Madman. Don’t let the prospect of Sean Penn playing a murderous prisoner (again) scare you off. Uncle Mel doesn’t pick bad scripts, and he picked a winner in this period piece about the assembly of the first Oxford English Dictionary.
I watched this for free on Tubi, and you can too.
While the text of the film follows the initial phases of one Dr. Murray fighting his way through the university system to cobble together an ambitious masterpiece, that’s just the backdrop of a human drama that delves into subject matter not often plumbed by modern flicks.
The first surprise is that the film takes the same position as the protagonist and Oxford itself in its love of the English language, all half-a-million-plus words of it. The interplay between well spoken characters and the clear affection that have for the glorious mess that is the Frankenlanguage of the English shines through, and without even a hint of ironic detachment. The men of Oxford are political creatures, as you would expect from university men stuck in the intelligentsia bureaucracy, and they have their factions and quarrels. Naturally, the antagonists on that front are painted as petty and short-minded, just to remind you who you should be rooting for, but the film-makers assiduously paint them as men who agree on the final destination of the dictionary project even if they disagree on the process.
Unlike most modern cinema, The Professor and the Madman, shows an astonishing level of love for the Britain of the late 1800s. The Empire of the day bestrode the world as a colossus, and the care and concern the British political class exercise within the film portrays those within the colossus as largely benevolent masters of the world. The scholars and their political purse-string holders are motivated on the personal level for the usual – money, fame, and glory – but they pursue those goals by striving to add to the sum of human knowledge. They want to leave the world a better place by leaving behind a single point of reference by which future generations might know their mother tongue and appreciate it’s history.
So too is the Empire painted as benevolent in the management of the insane asylum to which our Dr. Murray’s partner – a schizophrenic and autistic American medical doctor – is sentenced after a paranoia induced homicide. In less clumsy hands, the chief warden of the asylum would be shown as a cruel and vindictive man. In this film, he is shown as compassionate and patient, most hampered more by the state of the art in mental treatment technology of his day. So too is the face of the asylum guards shown to be a strong and capable man, strong and capable enough to show enormous amounts of empathy to people who have no expectation for it. There’s far more to these two men than mere caricatures.
Between the two titular characters and the asylum employees, the film presents a stunningly refreshing look at male friendship and mutual support. Often messy, sometimes hard, and not without tears of compassion and angry words of frustration, this movie look shard at what the male bonds look like when not hampered by modern porn-addled and sodomy-poisoned brains. The men are allowed to be men, and are allowed to show normal masculine emotions of affection and regret. Some exceptions apply given that one of the quartet is a legitimate lunatic who struggles to overcome his affliction and waffles between fury at the world and his own mental sickness, but his episodes are clearly presented as the actions of a disordered disease and not standard male toxicity.
And in his struggles, we follow a number of threads showing the difficult battle for forgiveness. Here the women take center stage as the literal widow fights to understand how the man who murdered her husband could then show such clear remorse and sacrifice his own well-being for hers. In a parallel thread, The Professor’s wife – a work widow – fights her own battle to forgive her hard-working husband for his absences. She is no shrew or harpy constantly banging on her husband for his work, but a three-dimensional woman who has to walk a fine line between giving him enough rope fulfill his duties as a scholar while also reining in his worst excesses and reminding him of his duties as a father.
it’s a dense movie, packed full of strong performances and thought-provoking subtexts. This is what Hollywood has been missing for the last few decades.
More like this, please.