The Daily News of Los Angeles

December  14, 2001 Friday, Valley Edition


HEADLINE: 'IRIS' HAS EXCELLENT EYE FOR CASTING

BYLINE: Glenn Whipp, Film Critic

   "Iris" isn't so much about the woman of its title - British novelist Iris Murdoch - as it is about her marriage to fellow writer John Bayley and, at its essence, the woman's complete inscrutability to those who knew her. Based on two memoirs written posthumously by Bayley, the movie doesn't quite succeed in giving us a portrait of the artist as a young woman, but then, that seems somehow appropriate since Bayley himself appeared eternally unsure of his wife's peculiar character.

    As it is, the movie succeeds on the strength of its cast -  Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as the older and younger versions of Murdoch and Jim Broadbent and Hugh Bonneville playing Bayley.

    "Iris" glides effortlessly between Murdoch's days as a young libertine and sexual free spirit to her last years as a victim of Alzheimer's. But it's not a disease movie and it's not a weeper about lost love. Instead, it's about how the lies we accept about our lives in our younger years come back to haunt us in the end.

    Bayley and Murdoch seem an odd match when they first meet at Oxford in post-war England. Bayley is a rumpled academic, a virgin, bright, good at writing words but unskilled at putting them across. Murdoch embraces life with a gusto, freely taking lovers of both sexes and refusing to be tied down by convention. What they share is a love for ideas and appreciation for the precision of words, and that intellectual bond carries them through 40 years together.

    But when Murdoch gradually begins to lose her mind, Bayley comes to his self-deception. Bayley wrote that when he met Murdoch, he felt like the "young man in love with a beautiful maiden who disappears to an unknown and mysterious world every now again ... but who always comes back."

    Once Alzheimer's takes hold of his wife and Bayley becomes the primary caregiver, he comes to understand the truth. "I've got you now and I don't bloody want you," he rages. "I've never known who you are, and now I don't want to."

    It's a searing moment, made all the more heart-rending by the expert way that Dench communicates the bewildering frustration brought on by Alzheimer's.  It's a subtle performance from an actress so good that we tend to take her for granted. Watching her as the failing Murdoch, ferocious in the beginning stages of the disease and then later staring emptily off into space, is to observe the work of a master.

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"IRIS"
(Rated R: nudity, sexuality, some language)
The stars:  Judi Dench,  Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet, Hugh Bonneville.
Behind the scenes: Directed by Richard Eyre; screenplay by Eyre and Charles
Wood, based on John Bailey's memoirs, "Elegy For Iris" and "Iris and Her Friends."
Running time: One hour, 30 minutes.
Playing: One-week Oscar-qualifying engagement at AMC Century 14 in Century City.
Will return to theaters in February.
Our rating: Three stars.

Thanks to Cindy F.

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