It’s here that we meet Steve Coogan as Frederick James Furnivall a fellow philologist who says to Murray – “Of course we the august delegates of the Oxford University Press have been attempting to make this dictionary for the last 20 years and despite the greatest efforts of a whole army of academics, myself included, we are precisely nowhere…This great tongue of ours which reaches out across the world has drawn its guns, sharpened its bayonets and declared that it will not be tamed”.
Meanwhile across town, Gibson is doing a damn fine job portraying James Murray, a Scottish lexicographer and philologist – I had to look up the meaning of both these words – using google, not the Oxford Dictionary – and true to his calling, in 1879 he was invited to Oxford to oversee the compilation of a new English Dictionary. Minor is found “Not Guilty” on the ground of mental insanity and sent to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in the village of Crowthorne, Berkshire. (This key aspect of the story to do with Minor’s mental health is explored in greater detail as the film progresses) The film opens in London in 1972, with Sean Penn’s character Dr William Chester Minor on trial for the shooting death of George Merrett, whom Minor mistakenly believed had tracked him down with the sole aim of torturing and killing him. The Voltage version of this film is a bitter disappointment to me.” More info on the background to the dispute can be found here – įor the time being we have to content ourselves with the version releasing in Australian cinemas. Sadly that has not happened in the way it could have.
Making it was never about money for Icon, it was about bringing this amazing story to the big screen. Unfortunately, due to a protracted legal wrangle, Gibson says this of the film, which was originally set to be released by his own Icon label – “I regret that this film will never be seen as it was meant to be. The Professor and the Madman has all the hallmarks of an Oscar-worthy production, in an incredible true story about the difficult birth of the Oxford Dictionary based on the 1998 book by Simon Winchester “The Surgeon of Crowthorne”, and when Gibson picked up the film rights from Luc Besson close to two decades ago, he began work on bringing the story to the screen. Mel Gibson and Sean Penn are multiple Oscar winners, so you’d back their ability to spot a premium project when they see one.
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