To judge by the result, which is gripping, the film-makers foresaw all the difficulties. They knew that they could only sketch the mind and art of the woman, but they had to do it sufficiently to support her position in the world; and they had to devise a means to make the slow detrition more than a sickbed watch. The screenplay is intelligent in both regards. Derived from the two books that John Bayley published about his wife--one while she was dying, the other after her death--this screenplay was written by two extraordinary men, unusually connected. One of them was Richard Eyre, who also directed the film and who is co-author of Changing Stages, a history of British and American theater in the last century. This book, in its course, discusses the plays of Charles Wood and says of him, "There is no contemporary writer who has received so little of his deserved public acclaim." Eyre's collaborator on this screenplay was Charles Wood. (Wood's screenplay experience reaches back to The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Knack, and that neglected gem How I Won the War.)

What Eyre and Wood have done to make the film dramatic is simple and thematically central. They have continuously juxtaposed Iris's early adult life in the 1950s--her meeting with John Bayley, their love and their marriage--with the old marrieds of the 1990s. From the very start there are two Irises and Johns: the film's first shot shows the young pair swimming nude in the Thames near Oxford, and in the next shot they are swimming "today" in swimsuits.

It would verge on the coarse to say that the present-day story is interwoven with flashbacks, just as it would be equally coarse to say that the early story is interwoven with flash-forwards. Eyre and Wood have situated their film in two time strata, and though this device is hardly novel in itself, it is used here for a unique purpose, the quintessence that underlies the film. This binary form lifts the film past the account of John and Iris, past any exploitation of her illness, to large inclusiveness. As we watch, we sense that, moving as their story is, it is not only their story. It is concerned with the awesomeness of life for everyone, the promises of the young posed against the whims of fate, the iron disregard with which time and chance sweep all of us along. Alzheimer's disease is not terrible here because it happens to an admired novelist and because it racks the admired literary critic who is her husband. It would be obscene to think that Murdoch's case was especially harsh because it happened to a brilliant person. Certainly no film would have been made of her if she had not been famous, but the film that her fame instigated eventually tells us that her fame is irrelevant. All of us, we can see, are borne by a current in which Alzheimer's is only one possible swirl, and the fame of the victim, if it exists, is only a toy of pathos.

Eyre, as director, seems always to have this idea in mind, as he knits the energies of the young pair with the cozier energies of their long married life. One moment in particular crystallizes this overall view. After the older Iris begins to deteriorate mentally, she goes for an encephalogram. When the X-ray is shown on the screen and a doctor's voice fixes the certainties, the film suddenly cuts back--to the young Iris arching through the water, nude, lovely, moving unknowingly but inevitably toward that encephalogram.

But it would serve Iris ill to hang it only with crepe: let there also be garlands. The film is self-evidently grave, but it is not lachrymose. Almost every moment in both time strands is thoroughly realized, as if that moment of life and living were being saved, not filmed. Eyre, who ran the Royal National Theatre for ten years, is an expert and graceful director. His non-theater directing has mostly been in television, though he has made a few films, and he knows how to work up close without crowding. And he relishes humor. The young Iris turns up for lunch one day at a man's house with John in tow. Obviously the man had expected a lunch with her alone, followed by a long afternoon en lit, but must now force himself to welcome the other guest. The host's irritation is conveyed without a word but with our accompanying chuckles.

We can guess that Eyre had a dream cast in mind when he first contemplated this film, and for some ridiculously lucky reason the dream came true. The older Iris is played by Judi Dench. If anything needs to be added to that sentence, it is only that, as the clouds begin to darken Iris's mind, Dench suggests that, inside her being, the original marvelous Iris knows she is being imprisoned. This may or may not be a clinical possibility, but it is a Dench achievement. The younger Iris is Kate Winslet, whose career has been mixed but who has clearly showed, even in such misfires as Hideous Kinky and Holy Smoke, that she has deep resources and a power of truth. Here we can see that she is the first English actress since Emma Thompson to approach the latter's transformation of verve and daring and intellect into attributes of sex. (Remember Thompson in Carrington.)

Jim Broadbent, long an endearing actor (one instance: W.S. Gilbert in Topsy-Turvy), plays the older John with a touching stammer and donnish tenderness. The screenplay wisely gives him one dissonant scene: lying in bed next to his sleeping, mentally remote wife, he remembers her sexual wanderings when young, and he bursts out in tearful anger at her. After this, he is again tender, even more credibly so. Hugh Bonneville, as the young John, has his aims fixed for him by Broadbent. He must be as much like the man who is to come as he can be: and he succeeds, with the loving bewilderment, the intellectual linkage, the appreciative awe of the older John.

In some of Iris's younger scenes and in her still-lucid ones later on, she speaks, at lunches and in lectures, of the mind as the source of freedom and of words as the vessels of thought. Samples of her ideas were necessary, but occasionally these lines, which I take to be quotations from Murdoch, are a bit heavily planted as contrasts to what will happen to her. Also, Murdoch's stature as a novelist is somewhat exaggerated. Well, Dr. Johnson said that "in lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath"; and I suppose that, in a comparable situation, neither are screenwriters. More important are the moments that vibrate in memory. One of them is the early scene in which the young pair are bicycling in the country. She races ahead, and John speaks--the first line of the film. "Wait for me, wait for me, Iris," he calls. It could almost be the picture's motto.

Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending me this article which appeared in The New Republic (UK) in the February 11, 2002 issue.

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