The Times of London

Agony in slow fade-out

BY BARBARA ELLEN

Does Hollywood do justice to the life and desperate death of Iris Murdoch? Yes and no

Richard Eyre’s Iris is a bio-pic about the late novelist, Iris Murdoch, based on her husband John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir, written just before her death, when she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.It is a tale of two couples. First, there are the young Murdoch and Bayley when they met at Oxford (played by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville). Then there is the couple they became, first pottering about happily together, like an academic Darby and Joan, then collapsing into despair and chaos, as Alzheimer’s left Murdoch, as she said herself, "wailing into darkness".

This latter, more tortured, couple are played by Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent, she with twitchy, blank-eyed stillness, he with a bumbling hyperactivity that seems unsuited to the role of carer.

What is lovely about Iris is that the young couple is not depicted as being in any way less in love, or indeed lovely, than their older selves. Furthermore, Iris is a movie which reverses life’s rules by finding the young (their beauty and promise) rather less interesting than the old (their wisdom and decline). In one of the final scenes, after Bayley finally confronts the fact that he cannot cope any more, they travel together in a mini-cab to Murdoch’s nursing home, the squalor of their situation contrasting painfully with their tightly clasped hands and their determined togetherness.

This is where Iris works best, in the small moments rather than the big picture. You see this in the scenes depicting Murdoch and Bayley’s early courtship — the skinny-dipping in murky lakes (water imagery abounds in Iris), the drinking of champagne from cracked mugs. You also see it with the older couple, before the illness, as they trip around supermarkets bemusing the staff ("Do you want premium points?" "Do we deserve them?"). The younger couple cannot really compete with this charismatic doddery pair, even though Winslet is the epitome of the blue-stocking libertine — tossing her clothes aside to swim, falling down a staircase, exposing daringly hairy armpits, intimating her own bisexuality in a sedate little café. It is all executed very nicely, but the older Iris and Bayley are by far the main event; batty as you like, but functioning well enough, with buttons missing from their cardigans, grime in their bathtub, and their beloved literature to oil the wheels.Things only unravel when Murdoch starts to struggle with her writing, sitting at her desk, puzzling over the very word "puzzle". A ridiculously dapper medic appears at their house to ask Iris what the name of the prime minister is, and she doesn’t know. ("Does it matter? Someone will know.")

Soon enough, Iris is in the hospital having a scan, and the doctors are informing the couple gently but firmly that this is one plot-twist from which there is no return. From there, Iris is not a matter of: "How will it end?", more: "Where and when will it end?" and: "How much will they dare to show?"

Is Iris an "illness" movie, an "issue" movie? In part, maybe. Eyre’s own mother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and he has made no secret of his special interest. Then again, if Iris is making a point about Alzheimer’s, then it seems rather politely put. Iris is seen going for a wee on newspaper in their increasingly squalid living room, but that’s about as bad as it gets. She never seems to exhibit the terrible frustration and consequent behavioural problems commonly seen in Alzheimer’s sufferers (Dench preferring a kind of quizzical vagueness beneath a big straw hat) and, late on, screen-Iris gets to experience moments of lucidity that one rather doubts real-Iris enjoyed. In one rain-strewn scene, Iris jumps out of the car, pursued by Bayley, and they both roll down a hill, covered in dirt and leaves, arriving at the bottom with Iris saying to Bayley: "I love you."

Alzheimer’s is many things, but it is never cute, so this must be an example of Hollywood Alzheimer’s, where the reality of the illness being portrayed is never allowed to get in the way of the script. This suspicion is confirmed by the astonishingly patient, saintlike people Iris encounters every step of the way — this is not a movie which seeks to offend its real-life players. Everyone emerges bathed in an almost celestial kindly light.

Elsewhere, although I accept that the film is based on Bayley’s memoir, I truly think it is a shame that Iris does not tell you much about Iris Murdoch herself (the child, the woman, the talent). In Shine we went on a journey with the gifted pianist David Helfgott that started with his childhood and segued naturally and heartbreakingly into his mental illness. With Iris, we are just plonked into the relationship between Iris and Bayley (as if she had actually been born fully formed at Oxford University), and then taken, choppily and rather too frequently, back and forth from youth to old age.

Just as Shine made you want to go and listen to the music featured in the movie, I believe Iris should have made you want to go and buy her books. But it does not. What it does is make you want to go and buy Bayley’s memoir of Iris, and (irrationally? unfairly?) that left me feeling slightly uneasy.

In the end, Iris is a tribute to how love can survive the most desperate of times. One particularly searing scene shows Bayley, exhausted and desperate, shouting at the unwitting, long-gone Iris that he hates and detests her. "Now I’ve got you all to myself and I don’t want you!" he rages, repulsed both by his wife and himself. "Ouch," says Iris, quietly.

Ouch, you think, and muse quietly on a previous Iris, vital and splendid, burning up the world with her intellect, quietly observing: "We all fear growing mad, don’t we?"