Iris Murdoch 

Conquering All but the Alzheimer's

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/14/movies/14IRIS.html?searchpv=nytToday

By ELVIS MITCHELL

The power of Judi Dench's accusatory stare — Ms. Dench could bring Anne Robinson of "Weakest Link" to her knees and still have enough energy to take on John Ashcroft — makes her the heir to Glenda Jackson's icy glare. Understanding the drama inherent in portraying the loss of that power, the director Sir Richard Eyre captures Ms. Dench's chilblain gaze slowly diminishing in the moldy, minor-key melodrama "Iris." She stars as the literary force Iris Murdoch, as her appetite for language and pleasure collapses under Alzheimer's disease.

In lectures Iris clips off syllables as if she were snapping peas, and Ms. Dench's precision suggests the mountainous joy that the writer derives from shaping and refining her sensibility. The writing is at its strongest in her fussy wrestling with her husband, the critic John Bayley (Jim Broadbent), who plays a dotty and much softer foil to Iris. The script by Sir Richard and Charles Wood is attentive and fine in observing the behavior of this long-married pair. The movie missteps when it tries to broaden the material; the director falls short of the task.

"Iris," which opens today at Lincoln Square, begins with the elderly Murdoch, who died in 1999, swimming underwater in a murky pond, where people from her life are drifting around, visible through the silt. Iris sees the younger, proudly naked version of herself (played by Kate Winslet) coursing through the waters. It's Sir Richard's way of playing out the loss of acuity in Iris's mind: the dense fluid of her mind, where nothing remains clear. And the movie shifts back and forth in time from the youthful and intensely eager Iris being courted by the shy, pudgy John (Hugh Bonneville) to the present, tracking Iris's descent from a television interview where she loses the thread of a statement she is making.

Amusingly, the young Iris is like a figure out of D. H. Lawrence with her snapping condescension toward conventional morality; one wonders what she would have thought of this movie, which seems to have been made by the kind of middle-brow she would have walked right past. It would probably be asking too much to get some sense of her writing into the picture, which uses John's struggles to care for his wife as its emotional foundation.

Unfortunately, the film lacks balance between past and present; one of the few differences between the two is that the characters are wearing different clothes. (Well, sort of: the two Johns have a bent for the same tweeds and flannels.) Sir Richard tries to set the film up as a puzzle, but the device he uses requires some of the vigor that Ms. Dench's Iris with her merciless superiority possesses. He's not up to it, and the film sags under the missed opportunities and the obviousness.

The movie's comfort zone is in the incidents of Iris and John's affectionate sparring and puttering around the house. "Iris" becomes drab and slowed in outlining the particular contrasts of the young Iris and the young John; he's a timid, stuttering bear cub led into the garden of earthly delights and jealous of her commanding worldliness. Mr. Wood once worked with a director whose nimbleness would have been more suited to marrying fizziness and despair: Richard Lester, with whom Mr. Wood collaborated on "The Knack" and "Cuba."

Rarely does a movie feel as leaden-footed as "Iris," especially when it tries to bounce back and forth. The audience is transported between two very obvious stories and becomes slightly irritated by the grinding inevitability of both of them. As a result, Iris Murdoch gets lost in the shuffle.

"Iris" seems to be this year's effort to put Ms. Dench into Academy Award consideration, an event that's as much a part of December popular culture as Dick Clark's "New Year's Rockin' Eve" — and as pro forma and unvaried.

Ms. Dench and Mr. Broadbent have a jabbing, likable rhythm; his effortless submersion into character is an enjoyable contrast to her willfulness, and her relationship with him makes her seem human. So when he gets to unleash the hurt and resentfulness that come from all of the years together and she is so damaged by Alzheimer's that she cannot respond, "Iris" can't help being moving.

The power of his outburst comes from the work that the director has done in setting up their puttering domesticity, and that is where the movie needs to dwell: in the wreck that Alzheimer's can make of a happy home.

"Iris" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes nudity and youthful bohemian sexuality.

IRIS

Directed by Sir Richard Eyre; written by Sir Richard and Charles Wood, based on the books "Iris: A Memoir" and "Elegy for Iris" by John Bayley; produced by Robert Fox and Scott Rudin; director of photography, Roger Pratt; edited by Martin Walsh; music by James Horner, with Joshua Bell as violin soloist; production designer, Gemma Jackson; released by Miramax Films. At the Sony Lincoln Square, Broadway at 68th Street. Running time: 91 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Judi Dench (Iris Murdoch), Jim Broadbent (John Bayley), Kate Winslet (young Iris Murdoch) and Hugh Bonneville (young John Bayley

Scenes From a Marriage

By DAVE KEHR

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/14/movies/14FLIC.html?searchpv=nytToday

The artistic director of the Royal National Theater in England from 1988 to 1997 and a Tony Award nominee for his direction of "Skylight" on Broadway in 1997 as well, Sir Richard Eyre is one of Britain's leading theater directors. He's also made a number of films, most of which he dismisses as television adaptations of his stage work. "One or two of them have had theatrical life," Sir Richard said, referring to his 1983 film, "The Ploughman's Lunch," and the 1984 "Singleton's Pluck," "but most have essentially been TV films."

"So this," Sir Richard said, "is the first film I've made that has set out to be a theatrical film from the beginning, and has not been a hybrid." The film in question, which Sir Richard wrote and directed, is "Iris," a compact account of the last days of the novelist Iris Murdoch (Judi Dench) and her relationship with her stuttering, donnish husband, John Bayley (Jim Broadbent), who must take charge when his wife begins to succumb to Alzheimer's disease.

"Clearly, this subject matter could very easily be an illness-of-the-week TV movie," Sir Richard said during a recent New York visit. "So I was absolutely determined that it would be a love story and not a chronicle of an illness. The relationship was what the story was about, and I wanted the audience to have only enough knowledge in order for the dynamic of the relationship to operate. I didn't want people coming and thinking, `I don't know enough about Iris Murdoch,' or, `I should have read up before going to see this.' "

In the most powerful scene in the movie, Ms. Dench and Mr. Broadbent are lying in a muddy ditch at the side of a road after a car accident caused by Iris's sudden attempt to leap out of the moving vehicle. "The logic of telling a love story is that there are certain points at which one or another of the characters declares their love," Sir Richard said. "And so that was the point in the film where she has to tell him she loves him, because the whole film has been accumulated anxiety on his part — is he loved? — and with increasing distress and despair, the question is begged. And finally, he is told he's loved, but by somebody we know, and he knows, to have most of their mental faculties removed. So it's a pure distillation of love."