This title sounds too much like the line from the Gilligan’s Island theme song, “the professor and Mary Ann – here on Gilligan’s Isle!” Hopefully, this movie isn’t as hokey and silly as that show. The fact that Mel Gibson had the same beard he wore in his role as Santa Claus in Fatman gave me pause.

Anywho, so it started out with Mel Gibson as the “professor” James Murray, a relatively uneducated savant (no formal undergraduate or graduate degrees) that was hired by Oxford University to put together the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language. The “madman” was played by the usually excellent Sean Penn, as William Minor, an ex-US Army surgeon from the Civil War whom suffered psychological effects from the war. In London, he mistook a man for someone he had tortured during the war, thought he was out to get him and so shot him dead. Declared insane, Minor was found not guilty of the murder and sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

So what do these two characters have to do with each other? Well, both were highly intellectual and had great ability to characterize words. Once realizing that it would take decades to fully characterize every word in the English language, Murry came up with the brilliant idea to open up the task to the public, and encouraged people to work on a word (etymology, definition, proper usage from a book quote) and mail it in. This tactic proved highly effective, and Minor, in a psychiatric prison with nothing else to do, made this task his life’s purpose, sending in over one thousand well researched words. The partnership grew to the point where Minor was integral to completing the first edition, and was credited with over 12,000 submissions.

A side plot was the bizarre relationship that developed between Minor and the wife of the man Minor murdered, Eliza Merrett, played by Natalie Dormer.

My only real issue with this movie was Penn’s performance. He was so ridiculously hammy it induced bouts of laughter, which deterred from the intriguing story. Perhaps Sean should have consulted the subject text of this movie for guidance. In fact, he was so hammy it was contagious, and drew Mel in several scenes into a guerre de jambon.

Oxford English Dictionary def of ham:

​ham

 noun

/hæm/

[countable] (informal)(often used as an adjective)an actor who performs badly, especially by exaggerating emotions

• a ham actor

One other observation – what’s the dealio with those ridiculous period hats – women’s were tiny, men’s were huge. Comical!

In conclusion, this was an interesting story which was historically true – funny how some of these historical movies are so much better than schlock fabricated out of whole cloth. In any event, even considering Penn’s histrionosis, I gave this two Oxford dictionary editions out of three.