"The Professor"

Life can be a funny thing. Some look at it from a philosophic point of view whereas others treat it like a wild ride with many ups and downs. Yet when faced with your own mortality, you're perspective can dramatically change, for better or worse.

Richard (Johnny Depp) has done what most people do, go to college, get married, have a family and work hard at his job as a college professor. Yet when he's thrown a curveball in the form of terminal cancer with only months to live, he starts to go through various stages of grief with a "I don't give a damn" attitude. Drinking heavily, buying pot off one of his students, and accepting his marriage has lost its luster with his wife Veronica (Rosemarie DeWitt) and how she's having an affair with his colleague Henry (Ron Livingston) and trying to be loving and supportive of his daughter Olivia (Odessa Young) and her recent announcement of her sexual preference to women.

Keeping his illness to himself with the exception of a good friend and colleague Peter (Danny Huston) Richard explores the world from the perspective that time is not given and what he chooses to leave the people he loves behind with as his legacy.

Subtly comical. A film that leaves you with a pondering matter. Johnny Depp is no stranger to audiences for delivering stunning performances as vast characters with various personalities and to see him portraying a straight laced character turned upside down into this grungy, somewhat pessimistic character that at the heart of it all still wants life to matter in some way makes for such a gripping film that will have you looking at your own life in a new light. While it doesn't give much in the way of closure and can leave you unsure about what will happen afterwards, it's performance is enough to get four and a half G.M.Stars and like Richard will have to come to accept its fate.

⭐⭐⭐⭐½
Green Mountain Stars

"The Professor" is available at Redbox and where movies are sold/streamed.