John Marriott

Iris (15) Director: Richard Eyre Starring: Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet, Hugh Bonneville

YOU might well think that Iris Murdoch and Tesco would not share the same planet, not even the same sentence. But here she is, a towering intellectual novelist, more given to pondering the meaning of life or love, wondering - with her dotty, doting husband John Bayley - whether the supermarket’s "bag for life" really is just that.

By this stage, she and Bayley are about to be hit by the effects of her Alzheimer’s, of which Iris is a powerful, detailed record. It is, however, almost an archetypal story of the disease, since director Richard Eyre has strangely omitted angling Iris through her work, so the sense of her plummeting from a creative powerhouse welded to language and ideas to an old lady fixated by Teletubbies is not as forceful as it could have been.

However, this is the only omission. The film’s themes of mortality, the difficulty of really knowing even your lifelong soulmate, and love in all its colours, as well as its progress from awestruck giddiness to deeply contented old age are all channelled though suggestion and gesture. There are no greater experts at this than Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent as the ageing, in-love couple. Dench, an actress of wonderfully unshowy intensity, comes up with stares which give us a window on the author’s growing emptiness and silent panic, the sense of a personality trickling away. Even when wandering around Oxford in a dressing-gown and a daze, there is no caricature, just a truthful interpretation of the increasingly ill Iris.

And Dench certainly doesn’t elbow Broadbent off screen. A bargain-basement actor would have pumped up Bayley’s eccentricity, but Broadbent reveals the academic’s sensitivity through it, making it part of a potent cocktail also made up of well-mannered rage and the ability to lose oneself in another.

Inevitably, such rich characters are more satisfying than the young Iris and John who, as we flash back to 1950s Oxford , are given life by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville. She is a charismatic advocate of free love and unbridled thinking; he a hung-up Englishman comically unable to articulate passion. All are served well by Eyre. He doesn’t miss a beat.

The Boston Globe 
February 15, 2002, Friday

By Jay Carr, Globe Staff

"Iris," Richard Eyre's film about the late novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, is one of those rare movies that, over time, deepens its hold and takes root in the mind and heart.

It is the best kind of love story, the kind that's left a little mysterious, especially to the two people in love, and it acknowledges that sometimes love takes the form of simple animal endurance. It's beautifully acted, with ardor, conviction, and heartbreaking softness arising in part from the fact that Murdoch, to whom words meant everything, spent the last few years of her life being undone by Alzheimer's.

Judi Dench gives one of her best performances as the aging Iris: warm, impulsive, honest, fearless, and insulted by life - the insult taking the form of her knowing that she doesn't know, that gaps are appearing in the keen, probing mind that was her glory.

It would be easy to fall into sentimentality, but Dench avoids the pitfalls and claws her way to a modicum of dignity - when she isn't unraveling, that is, or vacant. One of the most touching and life-assertingly madcap moments in the film comes when the elderly Iris opens a car door and tumbles down a riverbank. When her terrified husband, John Bayley, played with exquisite delicacy and loyalty by the incomparable Jim Broadbent, finds her in a clump of bushes, he lies down beside her, limp with relief, while she laughs.

It bookends a parallel moment during a flashback, when the young Iris (Kate Winslet), taking delight in scandalizing her Oxford circle, shows up to a party in a scarlet gown, slips on a staircase, and bumps her way down to the bottom, whooping with laughter while the shy, unworldly student who is to become her husband and companion for nearly half a century stands nervously at the head of the stairs, left behind, timid, and worried.

The film is drawn from Bayley's two memoirs about life with his wife, and it makes no effort to conceal the fact that he was always several steps behind her - intellectually, sexually, personality-wise. Part of the reason "Iris" is so potent and touching is the seamless way the aged Iris is played against her rampantly vibrant younger self.

Winslet doesn't really resemble Dench, but she's such a courageous actor that she turns out to be perfect as the young Iris, who was as shy and secretive as she was flamboyant. What's touching is the way she feels un threatened by the John of, first, Hugh Bonneville, and then Broadbent, who's human enough to blow up at Iris once in a while, but who loves her dearly and stays with her almost until the end.

We can feel the heat and urgency of their youth (it came mostly from Iris), also the comfortable-as-old-pussycats camaraderie they share in later life, and finally the reversal of roles, as Alzheimer's steals Iris from herself and John and their lives slide into disarray.

As Iris's personality is increasingly lost, gentle John becomes the stronger one, and they find themselves sharing a stark emotional purity in which even the spoken sentences suggest stony Samuel Beckett-like strings of irreducible essence.

Eyre, who collaborated with Charles Wood on the screenplay, also brings a feathery touch to the enterprise, even in scenes where the symbolism easily could have blown the poignancy off the screen, as when blank pages are seen blowing down a beach, sheets of possibility lost forever.

Thankfully, the film never plays like an official biography. It's scrappy, intimate, unruly, life-asserting, even funny, and filled with cumulative impact. Its subjective, impressionistic approach turns out to have been an inspired one.

"Iris" glows with rightness and convinces us we're sharing its characters' understanding that when the books and the memory go, love can remain. Tone is always the most difficult thing to capture in conveying the life of a person, much less a believably rendered shared life. The tender, beautifully burnished "Iris" gets it right.

Friday, February 15, 2002

By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Maybe Nancy Reagan has the right idea. She's fiercely protective of her husband, former President Ronald Reagan, and his descent into the darkness of Alzheimer's. The onetime first lady is not going to allow him to be photographed watching, say, a children's television show.I don't know if the late philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch really did stare blankly at the "Teletubbies" on TV, but she is shown doing that in the movie "Iris." While I can admire its depiction of a four-decade love affair, its three Oscar-nominated performances (and a case could have been made for a fourth), its extraordinary match-up of characters young and old, and precise film editing, I do wonder what Iris Murdoch might have thought.

Perhaps she would applaud how the film refuses to sugarcoat what Alzheimer's does to a person once described as "the most brilliant woman in England." Perhaps she would delight in its explorations of her favorite themes: the nature of good and evil, freedom, sexuality and love. Perhaps she would revel in its portrait of enduring love in all its giddiness, glory, pain, frustration and tenderness.

"Iris," opening today at the Manor Theater, is based on the memoirs of John Bayley, a literary critic who was married to Murdoch for 43 years. Director and co-writer Richard Eyre says the film "is not a biography nor is it fiction, but occupies a poetic territory somewhere between the two."

It tells the story of the Dublin-born Murdoch, played in her younger years by Kate Winslet and in her middle and older years by Judi Dench. Both actresses, justifiably, have been nominated for Academy Awards, as has Jim Broadbent, who portrays Bayley as a middle-aged man and then a white-haired senior citizen. The fourth in the quartet is Hugh Bonneville, who is Bayley as a young man and shares Broadbent's occasional stammer, mannerisms and looks to an uncanny degree.

"Iris" moves between the past and the period leading up to her 1997 diagnosis with Alzheimer's and eventual death in February 1999. The film paints a portrait of young Iris as free-spirited, sexually adventurous, bright, confident and fun-loving. When she catches her high heel on a step after a dance, she gleefully slides down the stairs in her red dress -- laughing all the way. When young Iris and John go for a swim in the river, she is naked and he's in his underwear, although he later doffs his skivvies after he's shed some inhibitions.

The structure of the movie, like memory, is fluid. In exacting editing, the young Bayley opens a door in the past and the older Bayley walks away from a door in the present. Since we're watching two different sets of characters and times, there's never any confusion about where we are.

As Iris begins her slide into Alzheimer's she asks, "We worry about going mad, don't we? How would we know, those of us who live in our minds anyway?"

It's a slow erosion at first -- she puzzles over a word, she loses her train of thought during a TV interview and she can't immediately summon the name of the prime minister. John reminds the experts that words mean everything to her, but Alzheimer's makes no exception for the eloquent.

As Iris, Dench goes from appearing perplexed and mentally agitated to seeming lost or baffled, being stone-faced, angry looking, physically agitated and sporadically unable to control her impulses, as when she reaches for the wheel while her husband drives.

In a more low-key manner than Russell Crowe, who plays a schizophrenic in "A Beautiful Mind," Dench must convey the tangle and black holes in her mind. She is absolutely convincing in that, just as Broadbent is as her husband who nearly buckles under the weight of caring for Iris but refuses to cede the task. Their house in Oxfordshire goes from untidy to unhealthy disarray.

"Iris" is not a conventional tale, but then again neither was its subject. It's not an easy picture to watch at times, and moviegoers with a personal connection to Alzheimer's may find themselves blinking back tears. Iris eventually retreats into her own world, where all is lost except love.

February 15, 2002, Friday

This could well drive you to the depths of depression. And yet it's a remarkable love story. For his first film since Laughterhouse 18 years ago (he's only made three others, all clustered in 83/84), stage director Richard Eyre has adapted Iris: A Memoir and An Elegy for Iris, two volumes of memoirs by Professor of Literature John Bayley about his late wife, the great English novelist Iris Murdoch.

Murdoch died in 1999 after spending much of the decade suffering from Alzheimer's (something that, not coincidentally, also afflicted Eyre's mother and which he details in his autobiography Utopia And Other Places), a disease that effectively robs its victims of their being and personality. In the case of Murdoch (played in her older years by Judi Dench) , her inability to comprehend and use the language she so deeply loved, the freedom of the mind she passionately advocated, words slowly slipping from her grasp, was all the more tragically poignant.

Bitingly, Eyre illustrates her decline in a scene where we see her watching Teletubbies.

Eyre's film is constructed as two parallel stories, entwining past and present through flashbacks of memory, dealing with both the latter stages of Murdoch's life and her youthful days at Oxford. What you don't get in either is any insight into her as a writer or philosopher (although the film makes great play of water, an image that consistently loomed large in her work) - indeed, although she is seen attempting to finish what would be her final book, other than a brief aside her novels barely warrant mention. But then this isn't intended as a literary biopic of an author's inspirations and achievements, it's a powerful account of a relationship that lasted some 40 odd years.

It was a strange one. When we first meet Iris at Oxford, played by Kate Winslet, she's a vivacious wild free spirit, given to nude bathing, flamboyant clothing, outrageous opinions and sexual liberation. Hardly the ideal match for the shy, stammering, plain and rather dull young lecturer John Bayley (Hugh Bonneville) who's so overwhelmed at meeting her that he chokes on his wine. And yet they fall in love and marry, Bayley remaining devotedly loyal to her over 43 years despite her ridicule and many infidelities with both sexes. The irony of course is that, after decades of being dominated by and looked after by his wife, when she becomes ill the positions are reversed. As she becomes increasingly remote, it's a situation with which Bayley (now played by Jim Broadbent) is singularly ill-suited to cope either mentally or - as the state of the home illustrates - domestically. His devotion and despair will tear you apart.

Arcing from the bright optimism and freedom of the 50s to the encroaching darkness of the 90s as Murdoch's light inexorably dims, it's a devastating emotional journey but also one portrayed without a hint of sentimentality. There's no worthily maudlin disease-of-the-week note to its portrayal of the terrible, spirit-crushing effects of dementia on all concerned. And yet the sense of the dignity to which they seek to cling is inspirational.

This is very much an actor's film. Juliet Aubrey and Penelope Wilton as Murdoch's lifelong friend Janet Stone deserve special mention, but inevitably it's the four leads who attract the most attention. And they are sensational. Sporting a bob cut and a trim postpregnancy figure, Winslet hasn't been (or indeed looked) this good since her debut in Heavenly Creatures while, last seen as Hugh Grant's chum in Notting Hill, Bonneville (who could easily pass for a younger version of Broadbent) is revelatory. Dench, it goes without saying, is magnificent, subtly capturing the nuances of Murdoch's overwhelming terror and sadness as she begins to realise what is happening to her. 'I wrote,' she says simply, tearfully, as Bayley reads to her from Pride and Prejudice. Two words but a whole epic of meaning. Whether she is sitting alone in the gloom or wandering confused through the street in her petticoat, her portrayal of mental affliction is the best, most compassionate and most resonant since Nigel Hawthorne in The Madness of King George or indeed Peggy Ashcroft in the BBC's late 80s drama She's Been Away. If the Academy are going to reward one portrayal of mental illness this year, the Oscar should go to Dench, not Russell Crowe.

And yet even she is eclipsed by Broadbent who, after his turns in Topsy Turvy and Moulin Rouge, must surely now be rated the Greatest Living English Actor. He's already won the Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe - surely the Oscar is only a formality. In one scene, when he is distraught after Iris has gone missing, anger, frustration and powerlessness overwhelm him and, as he lies in bed beside her, he explodes in a bitter fury of present despair and past resentment, shouting 'I've got you now and I don't bloody want you!'.

Love at its most agonising, most helpless, it is perhaps the finest, most wrenching moment of cinema you will see this year.

Feb. 15, 2002

At this point in her career, Judi Dench could probably dress up in a Barney the Dinosaur costume and read Maya Angelou poems for two hours, and the academy would still reward her with an Oscar nomination. But it wasn't until watching Dench in Iris - for which she just scored her fourth nomination in five years - that I realized how truly great an actress she is.

Which isn't to say that Dench's acting in films such as Shakespeare in Love and Mrs. Brown isn't flat-out terrific. But in Iris - playing the novelist Iris Murdoch as she succumbs to Alzheimer's disease - Dench does the bravest work of her career, by daring to chart the progression of a disease that's completely mysterious and unknowable.

She could easily have ended up looking ridiculous, or overdoing the dithering old-lady shtick. Indeed, she gives a performance so good that it's scary. I mean that literally. Anyone who has ever lost an intimate to Alzheimer's will be chilled by the verisimilitude that Dench manages to achieve here: the way, for instance, she gets her eyes to go completely vacant, suggesting the disappearance of a once-vibrant soul; or the way she conveys an Alzheimer's victim's brief flashes of self-awareness, when she realizes she is losing her mind and is powerless to stop that progression.

The rest of the movie isn't anywhere in the league of this stunning performance - in part, I think, because it doesn't have the nerve to be as unsentimental and harrowing as Dench is. Based on two memoirs by Murdoch's husband, the literary critic John Bayley, Iris adopts a back-and-forth structure. We see an elderly Iris and John (Jim Broadbent) as they both struggle to deal with her mental disintegration; then we flash back and see young Iris (Kate Winslet) slowly falling in love with John (Hugh Bonneville).

The problem with this structure is that it's grounded in the maudlin - and it ends up letting the audience off the hook, by not forcing it to fully confront the true horror of Alzheimer's. Yes, we do get a powerful sense of the fatefulness and devastation of the disease, but the picture doesn't want to be a complete downer, and so every 10 minutes we're suddenly watching the uplifting tale of first love in bloom.

This approach also does Murdoch a disservice, by not showing us what makes her tragedy so idiosyncratic. Namely, that a woman widely regarded as among the most important novelists of her time lost those essential tools of the novelist: the ability to write, think and remember.

But if Iris ultimately comes up short as drama or biography, it's hard to quibble too much. Winslet, Bonneville and Broadbent give stellar supporting performances, and Dench offers up the kind of acting that transcends a film's shortcomings and leaves an audience devastated. At 67, she's no longer just another amazing British actress; she's entered a state of grace.

Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Movie Critic 

Friday, February 15, 2002

One of the hallmarks of Judi Dench's acting is the intelligence, wit and swiftness of apprehension that her eyes reveal. One senses sympathy and intuition -- a gift for understanding the snags of life and the ability, as an actress, to imagine herself living in another's skin. In "Iris," a splendid portrait of the British novelist Iris Murdoch, those magnificent eyes turn vacant as her character succumbs to Alzheimer's disease. Impassive, lacking fire or expression, it's the "lion face" that clinicians note in Alzheimer's patients and that Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, described in his memoir, "Elegy for Iris."

Dench captures that masklike face and the tragedy behind it with an eerie power. And yet it's impossible to see or to pinpoint what she's doing much of the time. She's more than a great actress: She's a magician. Nominated for an Oscar as best actress this week, her work in "Iris" is one of Dench's greatest achievements.

Dench is reason enough to see just about anything, but in "Iris" we get four great performances -- the strongest ensemble in recent memory. Jim Broadbent, as fine an actor as Dench, plays John Bayley, a physically clumsy but devoted and deeply affectionate man.

Kate Winslet takes the smaller part of the young Iris, deftly matching Dench in tone and spirit if not particularly in appearance. She and Broadbent were also nominated for Oscars, and Hugh Bonneville, who plays the young Bayley, should have been.

Directed by stage veteran Richard Eyre and based on "Elegy for Iris" and a second Bayley memoir, "Iris and Her Friends," "Iris" shuttles back and forth between the '50s, when Murdoch and Bayley meet in Oxford, and the '90s, when Murdoch starts losing her mind and Bayley becomes a full-time attendant. The parallel time sequences are surprisingly effective because they illustrate not only the power and duration of the couple's love but also the potency of memory and the horrible frustration that Murdoch felt as that memory was gradually extinguished.

The young Iris is an intellectual lightning rod powered by ideas and words and her own promise -- a bisexual who treasures her friends and lovers but returns always to Bayley. The older Iris, progressively more confused and anxious, amuses herself with "Teletubbies," wanders from home and gets lost, and eventually can't remember the point of the sentence she just began.

"I feel as if I'm sailing into darkness," Iris says in the early stages of the disease. This material could be awfully dour, but Eyre and his cast find the pockets of humor: When a doctor tests Iris' memory and asks her the name of the prime minister, she can't provide the answer but still has the dignity not to apologize.

"Surely it doesn't matter," she finally answers with mild irritation. "Someone will know."

"Iris" isn't a perfect film. Eyre, primarily a theater director, lacks the sense of dynamics and momentum of moviemaking. His film tends to circle around its themes in a way that's generally better suited to a novel. It's more contemplative than suspenseful.

The performances are the raison d'etre: Dench, heartbreaking and impeccable as the aging Iris; Winslet, superb as a woman who's wiser, sharper than anyone she's played onscreen before; Broadbent, endowing the nebbishy, bumbling Bayley with a shy, touching humanity. Bonneville, whose work I'd never seen before, does an amazing job of matching Broadbent in gestures, posture and vocal inflection. For a long time, I thought I was watching Broadbent, made up to be younger. . Advisory: This movie contains nudity and sexual situations.