The Mail "IRIS" Review

Sunday, December 9, 2001

By Roger Lewis

How does one dramatise a writer's life? They don't do much except sit and scribble, with occasional interruptions to watch daytime TV or fetch a few more crates from the off-license. For every rugged Hemmingway there'll be a thousand Philip Larkins stamping books in the library.

With a lady novelist, however, you can go for glamour and pass her off as posh totty. And this is what they've done to my late friend Iris Murdoch, played by Kate Winslet in a new film based on her life with author John Bayley.

But Winslet, it seems, also had her own very personal motives for taking the role of the young author, played by Judi Dench later in life. The 25-year-old Titanic star, who split from husband Jim Threapleton in September, weeks after completing work on Iris said: 'The film is not only a wonderful insight into someone once described as England's most intelligent woman, but it is also an incredibly powerful, moving love story about two young people who were completely devoted to each other and depended on each other. At the same time they were completely independent, and were such individuals.

'One thing that can be said of true love is when you love somebody, you don' t want them to change. You want them to be who they are and for them to be free - and that's what they had.'  So was it especially poignant that at the premiere of Iris in Manhattan this week, Kate made her first public appearance with her new boyfriend, director Sam Mendes?

Kate may think she has learned about true love from Dame Iris, but I wish the novelist was still around to give her a stiff tutorial on matters of the heart. I'd have liked to hear her pronounce on how Winslet broke up her marriage and disrupted the rearing of her baby. Murdoch was, after all, fascinated by the power of money and fame, its misuses and its responsibilities. As is well known, Dame Iris was a victim of Alzheimer's, which killed her in 1999. What more cruel fate for such a brilliant woman than she should lose her mind?

Her husband John Bayley's three volumes of memoirs, chronicling the fear and hopelessness of dementia, form one of the most moving and candid love letters in the language. Bayley crisscrossed his account of caring for his increasingly doolally old wife with a magical evocation of how they met and married in post-war Oxford.

The film, which arrives in the UK on January 11, derived from Bayley's writings and also strived to contrast a young couple falling in love with a decaying old couple staying in love.

For director Richard Eyre, the key to the story was Bayley's solicitude. 'It was an extraordinary selfless act of love to look after Murdoch, and I found that tremendously moving. There was a major shift in their relationship, from being dominant to her being completely dependent on John.'

From the moment I first read Bayley's work, I knew it would make a marvellous film. For a start, actors adore doing illnesses, and Dame Judi Dench's portrayal of Alzheimer's is certain to win great critical acclaim.

The film begins with the characters swimming underwater. Kate bubbles to the surface in the buff and her nipples, I can report, are as big as Eartha Kitt 's head. I could have watched her frolic for hours. She has a brashness and a happy-go-lucky sexiness, but does she make a convincing Murdoch? The Iris I knew was frowny and intense with a darkness to her vivacity. She smiled sparingly - and her smiles were all the more special for it.

Kate's conception of her character as a fun-loving young thing comes across as airheaded. This is not how most people would define an Oxford Fellow in Philosophy. Kate's idea of Iris seems to confuse love and freedom with selfishness and possession, and this seems a dilemma in her own life, too.

Dench's Murdoch also has autobiographical overtones. The shoot was soon after the funeral of her husband of 30 years, actor Michael Williams. And when discussing Iris's marriage, she is describing her own: 'They totally understood each other and people talk of them always laughing. They were like two halves of an apple.'

Murdoch and Dench, frankly, could have been sisters, though they never met. They have similar backgrounds and share a kindly decorum and twinkling goodness (they should have been abbesses), yet beneath the sense of distance, a lurching romanticism.

Murdoch's emotions were processed in her novels, while Dench's warmth and humanity suffuse her characters. The main differences are that Judi is elfin and light, whereas Iris got to be quite a lump, and Judi enjoys her wardrobe, while Iris used to be mistaken for a bag lady. 'She had a pride about not caring,' says Dench, astutely.

When I first saw the film, I said I'd watched two hours of Judi Dench wetting herself. It isn't quite that squalid, but the filmmakers don't stint on showing you the loss of control over bodily functions - the way Alzheimer 's makes you a scuttling, panic-stricken animal.

Yet in Bayley's books the point is that 'even when Iris was ill, she was recognisably almost herself', and I'm not sure this comes across in the film. Dame Judi does a lot of staring into space. We don't ever see Murdoch' s fire and intellectual energy. We should have seen her duelling about metaphysics after several bottles of Cabernet and singing music hall songs.

And it is a tragedy that Michael Williams couldn't have played the mature Bayley. Jim Broadbent is a fine character actor, but his growling performance is too robust and imposing. For Bayley we needed somebody more Hobbit-like, pockets filled with biscuits filched from High Table, not this lumbering, nutty professor.

The young Bayley, however, is perfect. Hugh Bonneville steals the picture as he smiles and stammers through romantic agony. 'I instinctively knew the tone,' he says. 'John couldn't believe Iris was interested in him. He never quite understood her.'

I think he did, though. Bayley's fey, epicene quality was always a tease. He knew way before her illness that he was Iris's stability, and in this film (as in reality), he's the most interesting figure, with a will to survive and a tenacity to find love and hang on to it.

Bayley - who couldn't tell Dench and Murdoch apart when shown stills from the picture - confesses that he shed more tears watching the film than going through the events 'because it represented so well what it was like. A work of art does move one more than things do in life,' was his astoundingly generous response to a movie that, in the end, had me crying too.