The Professor and the Madman (2019)

The Professor and the Madman arrives with the weary dignity of a film that has survived its own production. Shot in Dublin in 2016, delayed by litigation, and ultimately disowned by both its director and its star, it tells the story of James Murray, the Oxford lexicographer, and William Chester Minor, the American surgeon confined at Broadmoor who mailed him ten thousand dictionary entries from a cell. It is a period piece about two Victorian men and a very long book. Mel Gibson and Sean Penn bring a certain stuffy intensity to proceedings that critics received with the enthusiasm of a man handed a lukewarm cup of tea.

Measured against the contemporary cultural ledger, the film is a near-total abstention. Its cast is drawn from the standard British and Irish period-drama register. There is no color-conscious casting, no LGBTQ thread, no engagement with race, no climate anxiety, no critique of wealth, no body-diverse representation. The conflicts are academic and institutional: a rival named Bradley scheming for Murray's position, a commission fretting over citations, an asylum director experimenting with humane treatment. Eliza, the widow of the man Minor killed, is given genuine agency and a small arc toward forgiveness, but the film mounts no argument about patriarchy. It simply lets her grieve.

The single point of contact with modern sensibilities is Minor's mental illness. The film treats his hallucinations and his confinement with a sympathy that borders on tenderness, and his friendship with Murray becomes a quiet case for compassion over punishment. Yet the vocabulary is Victorian throughout: madness, lunacy, moral treatment, a jury that cannot withdraw the insanity diagnosis. This is a portrait of suffering, not an advocacy document, and it never reaches for the language of contemporary neurodiversity. What remains is a handsomely photographed drama about etymology and forgiveness, with a mild moral streak and no ambitions beyond it. It wants us to feel for a man who maimed himself in a fit of guilt. That is a great deal to ask. It asks politely, and without a single bullet point.