"Iris" watches ruefully
but passionately as a love affair spanning five
decades moves from youthful free-spiritedness to
the devastation of Alzheimer's.
A tragedy for any couple . . . and a cruel way for any life to end. But when it happens to an intellectual - esteemed British author Iris Murdoch, sometimes called "the most brilliant woman in England" - it makes us ponder the mysteries and capabilities of the brain. In that regard, "Iris" is a companion piece to "A Beautiful Mind."
Born in Ireland and educated in Britain, Murdoch wrote 26 novels, including "A Severed Head," "The Black Prince" and "The Sea, The Sea."
"Iris" is not, however, as good a picture, although it takes fewer liberties with the true story upon which it's based than does "Mind."
Too short to do its subject's life full justice, "Iris" unsatisfactorily zigzags between Murdoch's time as an Oxford student in the 1950s, when she is just meeting her mate for life, and her Alzheimer's-caused decline in the late 1990s. (Diagnosed with the illness in 1997, Murdoch died in 1999 at age 79.)
And the would-be poetic way that director Richard Eyre has of frequently connecting these two Murdochs - underwater swimming - is too obvious.
But this doesn't matter that much. The performances in "Iris" - by Judi Dench as the older Murdoch and Jim Broadbent as her husband, John Bayley, and by Kate Winslet as the younger Murdoch - are so good that the film is completely compelling.
It is based on Bayley's memoirs, "Elegy for Iris" and "Iris and Her Friends." He is a literary critic, lecturer and scholar of considerable merit. Director Eyre and his co-screenwriter Charles Wood have, above all else, remained true to Bayley's regard for Murdoch.
This is an extraordinarily devoted and memorable older couple. Bayley, sputteringly nervous yet loving and good-humored, is far more interested in their life together, and the ideas they share, than in his material possessions. They are the classic British literary couple.
I love the scene, early on, where the two wander uneasily through a glaringly bright, endlessly expansive modern grocery. They give a new, mature meaning to the old Clash song "Lost in the Supermarket."
At last year's Telluride Film Festival, Danish director Bille August showed his new and extraordinary "A Song For Martin," based on the true story of a Swedish conductor/composer who develops Alzheimer's not long after marrying and finding happiness late in life.
In both films, there is a dramatic, public revealing of the victim's problems: Conductor Martin has a breakdown at a televised concert; Murdoch forgets an interviewer's question about the eloquence of language.
Immediately after that scene in "Iris," Eyre uses a jarring and extremely effective passage - an explosive burst of moving-train blurriness - to connote how everything changes. After that, Murdoch is "sailing into darkness."
Dench's handling of this journey is flawless. The irreversibility of it is never in question, the bouts of fear and confusion are all too real. She's careful not to let her face imply meaning to Iris' random actions, like setting out papers on a beach. (The film suggests through flashbacks that maybe, just maybe, there is some subconscious connection with her past.)
Broadbent, who should have received an Oscar
nomination for "Topsy-Turvy," is strong here. There's
room for him to show anger and pain as his wife's
health declines, but also for him to be loyally
protective.
His words of affection for her are touching. He calls her "little mouse" or "clever cat." When there's little else to do, he accepts her at a childlike level. He types as she watches "Teletubbies."
Pudgy with a pot belly, his white hair balding and needing spectacles to see, Broadbent's Bayley is a British academic-eccentric brought close to collapse by the weight of all this. One of "Iris' " more frightening aspects is watching the couple's cozy, book-lined Oxford home grow wildly messy. And when Bayley, himself, momentarily fails to recognize a neighbor who rescues the lost Iris, we know all too well what he fears.
Flashbacks to the 1950s portray Murdoch as a daringly racy libertine, a role well-suited for Winslet. Wearing her hair short and sharp, and unafraid to remove her clothes when the spirit strikes, she's a postwar modernist cheerfully discovering the world through experimentation as well as by writing.
The young Bayley she knows is played by Hugh Bonneville with just a bit too much tentativeness.
It's hard to watch "Iris" without thinking of reports of Ronald Reagan's 91st birthday, how he was unaware he'd been president. It's also hard not to think of a book Murdoch didn't write - Vladimir Nabokov's memoir "Speak, Memory."
We all want our memories to keep speaking to us.
Thanks to Jessica Wall for sending this article which appeared in the Denver Post on February 15, 2002.