Author Iris Murdoch and Oxford professor John Bayley shared a love that lasted 40 years, and director Richard Eyre pays tribute to that relationship in Iris. It's a lovely film on an intimate scale, with a quartet of terrific performances and a decent script (by Eyre and Charles Wood), but its brief runtime results in too much focus on the condition Murdoch developed in her later years and too few scenes delineating what made the marriage so special.
What works best in Eyre's film is its seamless transition between past and present. The courtship story line, with Kate Winslet playing Iris and Hugh Bonneville as Bayley, blends fluidly with the presentation of the couple in their senior years, when Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent take over the roles. What is suggested by this framework is that time collapses when people have been together four decades, and that today's swimming can bring back the impassioned skinny-dipping of yesteryear in the blink of an eye.
Water and words are the bedrock of the Murdoch/Bayley marriage, and the best moments in the film come in the detailing of these foundations. Besides the numerous scenes of splashing about, there are tender moments where the pair is shown typing in separate rooms, but still able to see and nod at one another. A terrific bit in a supermarket where the elderly John and Iris pun on various foodstuffs as they do the daily shopping gives an idea of the private language that they have developed, and what will be lost when illness strikes.
Iris becomes less satisfying when Murdoch the novelist develops Alzheimer's, and the film heads into Hallmark Hall of Fame territory. The initial scenes are nicely done, as she grapples with the blankness enveloping her brain, but there's a bit too much of the writer doddering around with her husband worriedly trailing after her.
The film's central tragedy is conveyed by a comment the young Iris makes to John — "If one doesn't have words, how does one think?" The sad irony is that Alzheimer's makes it impossible for her to answer her own question. What the movie makes clear is that even in this unfortunate situation, one can still feel. Though John makes fun of her and gets angry with her ("You can say anything to her as long as you make it sound like a joke," he tells an aghast friend), their love for each other never fades.
Though Broadbent and Dench are very good (and remarkable simulacra of the real people they play), it's Winslet and Bonneville who steal the show. If they hadn't conveyed the passion that develops between the shy, bookish fellow and the sensualist aspiring writer, the later scenes wouldn't be nearly as effective. While much newsprint has been spewed about whether or not the Titanic star is overweight, the far more important fact is what an astonishing actress she is. Nowhere is this more apparent than when the young Iris laughs as she accidentally slides down a flight of stairs at a dance. It's a moment that perfectly manifests the light inside of Winslet's character, and makes it clear that without her, Iris would have been much dimmer.
This article appeared on the Reel.com Website.