The Times of London

Film choice

BY JAMES CHRISTOPHER

IRIS 

Director: Richard Eyre, 2001

Stars: Jim Broadbent, Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, Hugh Bonneville

THE FORMER National Theatre supremo Richard Eyre has produced a peach of a film in Iris, which charts the relationship between the novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband, the academic John Bayley.

This might not seem an obvious choice for a rip-roaring romance, but from their first amorous fumblings at Oxford in the Fifties to Iris’s death from Alzheimer’s 50 years later it is an extraordinary tale of dependence and loyalty, and a heartbreaking portrait of a great mind turning to jelly.

Casting real-life characters has never been an exact science. But Eyre’s choice of Bonneville and Winslet as the young couple, and Broadbent and Dench as the elders, is so perfect as to be spooky.Bonneville bumbles after Winslet, who has never been more intelligent, like a middle-aged puppy; while the excellent Broadbent bumbles after Dench like a genial hospital porter.

To the tweedy Bayley’s horror, the young Iris was a bed-hopping sexual dynamo at university. But she was also precociously gifted and the only real hole in the film (and it is a huge one) is that it fails to convey what Iris actually contributed to literature. There are shots of Dench making sharp speeches to enraptured students at Oxford, and teasing glimpses of Winslet wrestling with manuscripts, but nothing of her books.Dench shoulders the most terrible moments, following her husband like a sheep around their cluttered, filthy home, bleating the same questions over and over again. This switch of dependence is a tragic marvel, and that Bayley doesn’t take his wife out into the garden and put a bullet through her head is a heroic testament to his patience and love.

On general release (rating: xxxx)