the improbable partnership between Murray and William Chester Minor made for a fascinating story, and despite heavy license in the cinematic retelling, the bare bones remain intriguing. Murray (Mel Gibson) is a genius autodidact with a staggering fluency in more than a score of languages. ...to take over the stalled editorship of the dictionary, he overcomes significant academic snobbery... moves his wife (Jennifer Ehle...) and family to Oxford... and begins to tackle the monumental assignment, which he estimates will take between five and seven years...
Paranoid American doctor Minor (Sean Penn), in a delusional state, kills a man... He’s declared insane and imprisoned [in a] psychiatric facility... Civil War trauma has triggered bouts of madness in this otherwise brilliant man of medicine...
A general call is put out for freelance contributors to submit word origins, and Minor maniacally begins bombarding Murray with references that advance the dictionary...
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