Dench's Iris blooms in the fog

By KARL QUINN 

Sunday 27 January 2002

Frequently one encounters a great piece of cinema that's not such a great film (the bulk of Luc Besson's work springs to mind, great-looking but vacuous pieces like The Big Blue and The Fifth Element). Less often one encounters a piece of thoroughly uninspired filmmaking that is somehow quite special. Iris is such a movie.

Based on two books written by John Bayley about his wife, the late Iris Murdoch, this is a deeply affecting film. In its narrowest sense it is a loving but unflinching portrait of a brilliant and difficult woman, but in its broadest sense it is a meditation upon mortality, a pointer to the way that lies ahead for all of us, no matter how exceptional we may imagine ourselves to be.

Iris Murdoch was certainly exceptional. As the film opens, we meet her in the later years of her extended prime. Addressing a luncheon of cardigan-wearing Oxford types, Dame Iris (Judi Dench) pauses in her lecture on the importance of education (the most solipsistic topic imaginable for this crowd) to sing a favourite song from her youth. A typical moment of brilliant unconventionality from the novelist-poet-philosopher, or an inkling of what's to come?

What's to come is Alzheimer's disease. Many people watching Iris will know this already, but that matters not a jot. To see brilliance dulled so fully is a tragedy of the most brutal kind.

Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were together for 40 years, and Iris flits back and forth between the first days of their relationship and the last. The young Iris is played by Kate Winslet, her hair cropped blue-stocking short, her eyes blazing with all the fierce intelligence she always seems to radiate. In her scenes, she paints a portrait of Iris Murdoch as sexually liberated (she's bisexual, and rabidly so), prodigiously talented (she trumps Bayley's talk of a planned novel with word that hers is about to be published), and supremely confident. Bayley, by contrast (played in youth by Hugh Bonneville and in later years by Jim Broadbent), is a stutterer, a ditherer, a virgin.

They're an unlikely match (and thus, following the logic of Murdoch's unconventionality, perfect), but only the brave or foolish would have put money on them being together for the long haul. And yet, there's John Bayley at the end, telling a befuddled Iris that he hates her because she's become unknowable to him and mopping up after her when she's pissed in the middle of the living room. If this ain't love, what is?

Director Richard Eyre is a veteran of the theatre but a novice of the cinema. In fact, the film was made with BBC money, so cinema was probably something of an afterthought. He films the early scenes with a nostalgic golden glow, and casts the later ones under a fog that presumably echoes the confusion settling upon Murdoch's mind. Other than that, he frames everything simply, with only an occasional gesture (such as Iris sitting on a beach surrounded by blank sheets of paper, capable of putting nothing on them but stones) nodding at the possibilities of cinema.

But what Eyre does have at his command is an exceptional cast. Dench is always impressive, but this is a magnificent performance. There's not a wrong note from any of the actors, but this truly is her film.

Thanks to Rachel C.

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