OK, I saw this last night. Good, far from great.
First—and I hate to do the Hollywood thing, but—the motivations of two of the key people are never clear. One guy wants to stop Prof. Murray (Mel Gibson) from heading up the Dictionary project. But it’s not clear why (class? jealousy?) Second, the doctor who is overseeing the treatments of Dr. Minor—Sean Penn-—escalates to more severe treatments, but then in the end seems to willingly throw in with Murray.
Second, Penn’s emoting and overacting is (pardon the pun) maddening. I couldn’t hear half the dialogue. Both Penn & Gibson whisper a lot, but Penn in particular with his crazy character adds in other indistinguishable inflections.
The project itself is inspiring and the forgiveness/love story (even if true) is mind-boggling.
See what you think.
The revieweralso had problems with the script's lack of focus. But I am still curious about the entire mise en scène effect of being in that period, with those clothes, those accents, those backgrounds, furnishings, props like the library books and writing implements, and whatever shreds of the real story the writers did manage to shoehorn in there. It's probably at least as historically accurate as A Beautiful Mind or many of the BBC period dramas, which is to say, 30 to 50%—but moreso visually realistic.