“Mind Games”: passions around the dictionary

England, mid XNUMXth century. Oxford pundits have been struggling for a couple of decades to create a new dictionary of the English language that would contain all the literary and colloquial English words with a brief history of origin and evolution. It is clear that such a titanic work cannot be mastered by a handful of professors, and scientists are throwing a cry all over the country: anyone can send a quote from a book illustrating the meaning of a word. The British responded to the call, sending two tons of letters to Oxford, but the editors were not able to cope with the volume.

In 1879, James Murray (Mel Gibson), a polyglot Scot without a degree, joins their team, despite the dissatisfaction of the academic crowd. Murray appeals to all native English speakers with a new call, and one of the volunteers is William Minor (Sean Penn), a military surgeon, an American convicted of murder and serving a sentence in a psychiatric hospital.

While Murray and his associates “chase” the words, looking for them in sources and meticulously tracing the story (it looks like a group of FBI profilers are tracking down a criminal), Minor escapes from his pursuer – an Irish deserter who was once branded by him, who is now hunting for a surgeon, appearing to him at night. Defending himself from his “black man”, the surgeon killed an innocent passer-by by mistake, for which he ended up in a hospital. Minor has paranoid schizophrenia, which developed against the background of PTSD, but in the yard of the XNUMXth century, it means that things are not very rosy with diagnosis and treatment.

The story of the hero Sean Penn turns into an excursion into the history of psychiatry at the end of the XNUMXth century: in the office of the attending physician Minor, there is a phrenological head (at that time they believed that there was a connection between the structure of the human skull and the psyche) and a restraint chair invented in England, treatment methods are used for the hero, which are difficult call it anything other than torture. For a while, Minor’s demons recede, he finds salvation in working on a dictionary and friendship with Murray.

It took Murray and his team five years to prepare the first edition of the dictionary. The film took four times longer: Mel Gibson bought the rights to Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne back in 5. He planned to shoot himself, then changed directors twice, perhaps because of this, the picture about the friendship and cooperation of a professor and a madman (original title – The Professor and the Madman) turned out to be flawed. Despite its imperfections, the film touches on important themes of guilt and the possibility of its redemption, our ambitions to embrace the immensity, and the attitude to language as a living substance and equal respect for all words without exception. And to those that sound in the temples of science, and to those that are heard in the squares.