Judi Dench and Kate Winslet are superb in the near-faultless magicking of John Bayley's life of Iris Murdoch into film, says
Before Iris I had always thought that the "moment of truth" of Judi Dench's acting was her Cleopatra at the National Theatre. No one that short and pudgy, with those currant eyes and squiffy features, could play history's great seductress. Yet she did. Played and won in straight acts, with Anthony Hopkins's Antony as her ballboy.
After seeing Iris, though, I realise I was wrong. With Dench every moment is a moment of truth, both in her acting and our experience of it. Each time we say of a gesture or line-reading "She's never done that before" or "Oh no, she couldn't be doing something that brave, imaginative, truthful and offhand" - all epithets apply - she goes on to do something even braver, more imaginative etc. As Iris Murdoch she wears a fringe and becomes Iris Murdoch: it seems that simple. The face is gaunter, the eyes at once more inward and more impolitely challenging, the voice no-nonsense as it picks words like weapons - weapons of war or love.
John Bayley's book about Murdoch's descent into Alzheimer's Disease is magicked near-faultlessly into film. Director Richard Eyre, who co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Wood, intercuts freely the old and young versions of Iris and John. No laboured "I remember"s; no cumbrously cued flashbacks with fuzzy lens or desaturated colour. Past and present are kissing cousins here. And the wilful, demanding pantheist we see in Kate Winslet's wonderfully played young Iris - cycling two bike-lengths ahead of any companion, skinny-dipping as if it were a required pagan rite - is credibly "mother to the woman", parenting the heathen/ humanist novelist and philosopher who lived in missionary untidiness with the man she picked to live with after using up all the others.
Jim Broadbent and Hugh Bonneville, chubby-faced and hyperanxious, are perfect as Bayley old and young. Each plays Fool to Murdoch's Lear, a clownish standard-bearer for sanity who realises he must join his monarch in the wilderness to have any hope of pulling him out of it. Like Lear the film keeps pulling us in fresh directions. Just when Murdoch's decline seems too sad to bear, there is a moment of high comedy. Watching Tony Blair do his "Education, education, education" mantra on TV, she asks "Why does he keep saying that?" At the same time - everything connects - we hear the echo of her own first intimation of illness: "I've just said that," of some trivial reiteration from a woman who would never normally make one.
Near the film's end Murdoch tumbles from a moving car at night down an overgrown embankment where - to a Bayley who gets out to join her in companionable prostration - she faintly bleats, as if in a last pulse of coherence or instinctual memory, "I love you". Lost in some simulacrum of what the couple has called the "jungle of the mind", they share a moment of truth. Except that, as Murdoch and Dench have differently taught us, everything is a moment of truth really - if you give life the loving, determined, patient attention it deserves.
This review appeared in The Financial Times (UK) on January 17, 2002. Thanks to Mike Kennedy for the lovely picture.