I had the rare opportunity last night of seeing back-to-back films that are up for Oscar contention. One of them succeeds brilliantly. The other is more problematic.

First the good news. Dame Judi Dench is absolutely remarkable as the title character in Iris Before her starring role in Mrs. Brown a couple of years ago, Americans did not know much about Judi Dench. She was a fine British stage actress but hadn't crossed over here much either on film or in the theatre.

Of course, Mrs. Brown and then Shakespeare in Love changed all that. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for the latter, even though she was on screen for about 8 minutes. Nevertheless, her overnight career, at age 65, was cemented.

Last year, she picked up more appreciation in Chocolat. Now she's in two new Miramax films, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch and the upcoming Shipping News. As the famed British novelist Iris Murdoch, Dame Judi has the unenviable task of trying to communicate the writer's last year as she coped with Alzheimer's Disease. Already you're thinking, who wants to see that?

But with the help of director Richard Eyre and castmates Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet, and Hugh Bonneville, Dench is simply amazing. She conveys all of the sadness of Iris Murdoch's life sentence while investing her with a tremendous amount of vitality. It's an invigorating, inspired performance, so far above the average "disease of the week" grandstanding that it should be shown probably as a lesson for future actresses.

What you like most about Dench's Murdoch is that she doesn't make her suddenly wise. There is no long, drawn out goodbye for Iris Murdoch. Thanks to a clever script, Murdoch's illness takes her down into the rabbit hole of dementia quickly. What Dench does is make the audience accept the inevitable without feeling pity for Murdoch. Instead you feel admiration.

Dame Judi is helped enormously by the three supporting performances, most especially Kate Winslet's as young Iris. Winslet has never been better, and there's no doubt of her getting a nomination as well. Jim Broadbent — the character actor who's stacked up a bunch of great turns recently in Moulin Rouge, Little Voice, Bridget Jones's Diary and Topsy-Turvy — is marvelous as Dench's seemingly doddering but devoted companion, John Bayley.

Richard Eyre, who's a British theatrical director, makes the most of the script by cutting back and forth between Iris and John in their youth and the couple as they grapple with Iris's demise. It's a neat gimmick but might not have worked in less skillful hands. Everyone involved uses a "less is more" attitude, and it was the way to go. I can't recommend Iris more highly. No gratuitous weeping, and the ironies are kept to a minimum. It's so nice not to be hit on the head with a mallet.

[The review goes on to talk about Sean Penn's performance in I am Sam, which I snipped.]

Thanks to Anne Marie Bourdon for sending this review which appeared on the Fox News website on November 14, 2001.

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