The Professor and the Madman is a movie about the professor named James Murray who wrote the Oxford Dictionary and the doctor named William Chester Minor turned madman who helped him. The doctor was a surgeon and he was in a war in which he had to see horrible things. He then found his way in England somehow, and was having horrible dreams and hallucinations. He killed an innocent man while he was having a mental breakdown and found himself in a psychiatric hospital. There, he learned that they were requiring help with the dictionary and he started to search by reading a lot of books and he sent letters of every word he can research to help to the linguist.
I really liked the acting of both the professor (Mel Gibson) and the doctor (Sean Penn). Mel Gibson’s Scottish accent was so nice to listen and he had a fatherly figure, a figure I would thought if someone asked who do you picture the man who wrote the Oxford dictionary. But Sean Penn’s acting was so extraordinary. Towards the end of the movie, the lead psychiatrist of the hospital tried something on him (I’m going to get into detail it was horrible to see) and after this experiment the doctor was a completely lost soul. His eyes were lost and empty, he wasn’t talking as if his body couldn’t carry the weight of his soul anymore and it was so scary to see. Penn played it so well that I thought I was seeing a real psychiatric patient on the verge of death and I was really horrified. It really affected me.
The movie is slow-paced and it can bore you at times if you’re not into slow-paced movies but I recommend watching this movie to everyone because as I said the acting skills are fantastic and the topic is very interesting.