IRIS Synopsis

IRIS RPS Video Clip Long Synopsis with Screen Captures from the Film Opening Title Sequence IRIS tells the story of the enduring love between the novelist and philosopher IRIS Murdoch and her husband John Bayley, fusing the romance of their early days at Oxford in the 1950s with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease some 40 years later and her death in 1999. Go to Miramax Press Notes Go to IRIS Information Page
IRIS MURDOCH (Judi Dench) and JOHN BAYLEY (Jim Broadbent) are the guests of honour at a fund-raising dinner at Oxford University’s Somerville College. The college PRINCIPAL (Eleanor Bron) introduces IRIS as a "noted philosopher as well as author of some 26 novels" and her husband as "the distinguished Warton Professor of Literature." IRIS gives an address about education and the importance of freedom the mind, and then to everyone’s surprise and delight, she sings an Irish folk song: ‘The Lark in the Clear Air’. She is in her prime. Her friend JANET STONE (Penelope Wilton) watches her admiringly. JOHN listens with adoration and his thoughts return to the past.
YOUNG IRIS (Kate Winslet) holds forth at a dinner with her colleagues, including Young Janet Stone (Juliet Aubrey), who will become her life-long friend. After dinner, IRIS is introduced to the Young John Bayley (Hugh Bonneville) for the first time. YOUNG JOHN is so overwhelmed that he chokes as his wine goes down the wrong way. She tells him that it’s amazing that there’s a right way. "Trust the body," she says, "I always do."
IRIS gives a lecture. It’s about love: "Human beings love each other, in sex, in friendship ... and they cherish other beings, humans, animals, plants, even stones."
YOUNG IRIS and YOUNG John cycle along the banks of the river Cherwell, and she confides to him that she has written a novel, that no one has read. She asks him not to tell anyone about it.
IRIS and JOHN shop in the supermarket – an amiable, normal, if eccentric, couple who clearly adore one another. They go for a drink in a pub and for the first time IRIS has some inkling that her memory is unreliable: she starts to repeat herself. JOHN is blithely unaware, remembering his courtship of her.
YOUNG John, dressed in a dinner jacket, waits in the pouring rain for YOUNG IRIS outside an Oxford college. She arrives wearing a flame-coloured taffeta dress and they run into the college where a dance is taking place. They dance the cha cha together and YOUNG JOHN meets YOUNG IRIS’ friend, YOUNG JANET. To YOUNG JOHN’S surprise YOUNG IRIS asks to see his college room. In the room she tells him that her novel is about "how to be free, how to be good, and how to love." They drink champagne out of tea cups, and they kiss.
IRIS is beginning to be anxious that her mind is going. She is having trouble spelling words as she writes, and she panics about a cat and a fox fighting in the garden. She fears she is going mad: "We all worry about going mad, don’t we..."
In a café in Oxford, YOUNG JOHN comes to meet YOUNG IRIS and finds her in the company of an attractive, Eton-cropped young woman. The woman leaves as YOUNG JOHN comes in. He asks YOUNG IRIS if she likes women. "You mean lesbians?" IRIS replies, and she smiles enigmatically when he asks her jokingly if she goes to bed with them.
IRIS becomes more anxious about losing her mind; JOHN watches her fearfully.
Outside YOUNG IRIS’ flat, YOUNG JOHN looks up at her window and sees her kissing someone, man or woman. He crosses the street and goes in, up the stairs, opens the door and peers in. What he sees shocks him and he runs away. Later, outside, YOUNG JOHN watches as a man leaves the house.
IRIS arrives at the BBC’s TV studios for an interview. She is shown into the studio gallery, where she sees on the monitors an earlier interview, in black and white, in which her young self is talking about writing. Later, on air, the presenter (Joan Bakewell) asks IRIS if she believes that language is becoming debased. IRIS explains that the importance of reading and writing is in their being connected to thought, and then she stops dead: she’s completely lost her thread.
IRIS turns up at home, in a panic and shouting for John. He runs down the stairs. She tells him that she had no idea what she was doing in London, and for John this is sufficient confirmation that something is seriously wrong. Later, a worried young doctor, Dr. Gudgeon (Kris Marshall) asks IRIS if she knows the name of the Prime Minister. IRIS can’t recall it. The doctor says that there will have to be tests and scans, but John replies that IRIS has a very clear mind.
IRIS has a brain scan, and JANET turns up to take her and JOHN home. IRIS and John drink a toast to the completion of her novel. She says she feels as if she’s sailing into darkness. She undergoes further tests. The Neurologist (Tom Mannion) is unable to offer her any consolation, and tells her that the disease is implacable. John can’t believe that her words and thoughts will gradually dry up, like "dead birds dropping."
The postman (Derek Hutchinson) arrives at Charlbury Road with a package. John opens it to find a copy of IRIS’ latest novel from her publisher. IRIS doesn’t even recognise it. She shuffles behind John, to his annoyance following him round the kitchen "like a water buffalo",.
IRIS and John go swimming in the river. IRIS sees her younger self swimming towards her under water, naked, like a mermaid. YOUNG JOHN in his vest and underpants, dries the naked young IRIS with her petticoat.
YOUNG IRIS and JOHN turn up for lunch at a house in Oxford, their hair and her petticoat - in his pocket - still wet from the swimming. Young Maurice (Samuel West) opens the door, surprised and put out to see YOUNG John with her. Over a lobster lunch, YOUNG Maurice accuses IRIS of using her friends as material for her writing, but IRIS angrily denies it. YOUNG Maurice is clearly jealous of John, and curious to know if they have made love. Later that afternoon, YOUNG IRIS invites YOUNG John up to her flat, where she gives him a copy of her manuscript and suggests that they make love. They do.
IRIS’ illness begins to take its toll on John and he loses his temper with her. Distraught and guilty, he sits her down and reads to her from Pride and Prejudice. She interrupts him: "I wrote," she says, with tears in her eyes. "Such things you wrote," replies John.
The Neurologist shows John a scan of IRIS’ brain. John can’t understand how, if her brain world is empty, she can say anything lucid, but the Neurologist can offer no explanation. John still believes that she’s alert; he suggests that he should learn her language before the lights go out.
IRIS and John run across a beach in Suffolk. Janet Stone and JANET’s daughters, Emma (Juliet Howland) and Phillida (Saira Todd) greet them. JANET is very ill, but makes light of it – "tummy trouble", she says. IRIS wanders off and sits down by the sea with a notepad. Can she write? She carefully tears out pages and lays them on the shingle, a stone placed on each page. She turns to look at the beach hut where she wrote in the past.
YOUNG IRIS is writing, watching YOUNG John who is talking to YOUNG Janet. He says that he feels that doesn’t have YOUNG IRIS all to himself, then goes off for a swim in the sea, fully dressed, much to the amusement of YOUNG IRIS, YOUNG Janet and her children.
At night, on the veranda of Janet’s beach house, IRIS takes things from her cardigan pocket - pebbles, shells, seaweed, a Coke can - and puts them on the table. IRIS dances with Janet to the music on the radio: a French song by Charles Trenet. IRIS and JANET appear to be comforting each other.
Back home in the dead of night JOHN is in bed, listening to IRIS shuffling round the house talking to herself and singing ‘The Lark in the Clear Air’. He remembers YOUNG IRIS singing the same song, "her mother’s song". He is jolted back to the present by the sound of IRIS peeing on the floor.
Some days later, John is working at his typewriter in the kitchen while IRIS watches the Teletubbies. After a while he looks up from his work. The television is on in the sitting room but there is no sign of IRIS. He knows immediately that she has disappeared. He drives, looking for her, but she is nowhere to be seen. A policewoman (Emma Handy) comes to the house and is appalled by the filthy state of the house. John is distraught.
IRIS, bedraggled and soaking in the rain, walks hurriedly along a dual carriageway, along another road, and past a row of shops. Later, John opens the door to IRIS old admirer, Maurice (Timothy West) who has found IRIS in the supermarket. John fails to recognise him. IRIS now seems remote from JOHN. "Were you trying to get away from me," he says, and later, lying in bed with IRIS, he remembers the occasion when he opened the door of her flat and saw her, astride a man, making love.
In a desperate fury JOHN shouts at IRIS as she lies beside him in bed: "I’ve got you now and I don’t bloody want you! I’ve never known who you are, and now I don’t want to!"
YOUNG IRIS tells YOUNG JOHN that it’s time she told him about her past lovers. YOUNG JOHN is agonised but she tells him that he matters more than anyone to her: he is her world.
JANET is dead and, in an agony of despair, JOHN addresses the congregation at her funeral. IRIS sits in the church between her daughters like a prisoner under escort. Outside the church, she lashes out and starts shouting, as if suddenly realising for the first time that Janet is dead.
In the car on the way home, IRIS pulls at the wheel as John drives and he nearly loses control. The car swerves. Suddenly, IRIS wrenches open the car door and falls into the night. John screeches to a halt as soon as he can. He runs frantically back down the road calling for her. As a car blasts past he falls down, through a hedge, and ends up lying in the undergrowth beside IRIS. She is unhurt, laughing. And then she says, "I love you."
IRIS is taken to a nursing home, where she will be cared for. Some weeks later, she lies in her bed, JOHN sitting beside her; she is dead. "Do you know," says JOHN, "I wouldn’t mind doing that myself."
Back in the house, JOHN is emptying a drawer. He comes across the petticoat which he stuffed into his jacket pocket so many years ago. On the bed there are some stones that IRIS collected, arranged like a memorial to her. One of the stones falls off the pillow. It tumbles slowly through the water to the bed of the river.
November 25, 2006 "IRIS" Main Section DJD Site Map	A Big Thanks to Anke for Sending These Screen Captures