cassette

FILM REVIEW: PROFESSOR
AND THE MADMAN
BY CEMRE TOMRUK
The Professor and the Madman is a movie that can make
you feel a lot of different emotions and it may surprise
you with its deep meaning. Take it from me, when I
started watching it, I felt tense, then I felt disturbed,
then disgusted, then sad, then angry, and then I was
furious and I was sad again… In the end, I had cried three
times and when I left the computer screen, I was really
proud to be able to get through that emotion storm. It
affected my brain as well as my heart, I was questioning
some moral and deep ideas while wiping my nose.
This 2019 film is about the creation of the first edition of
the Oxford Dictionary, which is why my English teacher
suggested the movie to me. The two protagonists have
different lives but they have similar minds. One of them
is a hardworking linguistic professor -not a formal one
yet- who knows almost everything about his profession
and acts very humble about it because of his education
level. He -James Murray- applies to a project of Oxford
and is very passionate about it. He is a well-qualified
person but he has to solve some controversies with
Oxford’s authorities to be able to continue his noble
mission. There comes the second protagonist:
Dr. William Minor is a qualified doctor and he is a genius.
However, this intellectual is facing psychological
problems due to his horrific military past. He is also
a criminal, he unconsciously kills a man in the first 10
minutes of the movie and he is hated by the community
for the murder. Because of this crime, he becomes a
prisoner. After a certain sequence of events and regrets,
the genius prisoner somehow learns about the
dictionary project.
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