The Professor (2019)

Wayne Roberts's The Professor arrives with a terminal diagnosis, a bottle of something brown, and Johnny Depp in a tweed jacket, which is to say it arrives with a great deal of attitude and very little else. Richard Brown learns he has months to live and responds by dismantling his own life in front of an audience. The film glances at contemporary social furniture without ever moving it. A Black student sits in the lecture hall and is never asked to be anything but a student, which is its own quiet mercy and also its own quiet absence of interest. The daughter announces at dinner that she is a lesbian, the mother waves it away, and the screenplay files the matter under unresolved and returns to the professor's feelings.

The film's treatment of women is the sort that critics noticed immediately. Variety called it misogynist in outlook, and the charge holds: the wife, the student, the daughter exist to orbit a man's unraveling. There is a swipe at the dean for misusing university funds, though it lands as personal vengeance dressed up as institutional critique. No environmental conscience stirs. No body politics. No neurodivergence, since Richard's recklessness is a medical matter, not a neurological one. History goes unrevised, because there is no history here at all.

The lectern remains. The whole enterprise is built on a man who talks at rooms, and it ends where such films always end, with a final class and a speech about embracing life and facing death. The sermonizing is steady but mild, carpe diem with a whiskey chaser. The Professor is a film that wants credit for candor while keeping every safe distance. It gestures toward the cultural conversation of its moment and then walks out the door with the dog, choosing the unmarked path, having said nothing of substance to anyone.