True essence of author distilled with love

by Evan Williams

The Weekend Australian 

February 2-3 2002

Four stars ****

There’s mention in the credits of a "solo violin". Not a good sign, I thought: sounds like a tearjerker. But as regular readers know, I’m partial to a good tearjerker, and "Iris", touted as "one of the great literary romances of the century" (the 20^th, that is), is one of the best. In fact, it works better as a superior tearjerker than it does as a great literary romance: the latter, surely entails a measure of daring, of risk, of social ostracism boldly defied, of tempestuous partings and reconciliations. But Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, so far as one can tell, enjoyed a remarkably warm, almost placid, attachment for most of their 40-odd years together, rarely raising an eyebrow. Iris had her affairs – who in Oxford did not? – but it was a loving and largely untroubled marriage until her death from Alzheimer’s in 1999.

I call her Iris and always have. It’s a liberty one takes with favourite female writers whose first names are distinctive enough to preclude ambiguity. It was always Ruth, or Agatha, or Anita for me, though I never felt comfortable with Doris or Muriel or Edna. But then, Iris was more than a writer: she was part of our growing up. She supported nuclear disarmament and the election of the Wilson government in Britain, and because she was an Oxford philosopher one knew she must be right. It was rather a disappointment when she became a Thatcherite in the 80s. Of her books, my favourite was "The Sandcastle" (the most conventional, I suppose), after which the novels became more weird, with increasingly bizarre sexual themes, until I lost her with "An Unofficial Rose". But I loved her name, her brisk limpid sentences, her serenely beautiful face, her ideas, the very thought of her; and there are moments in the books that still enchant and haunt me.

It was a terrible death, especially for a writer, and that haunts me, too. And it’s really what Richard Eyre’s film is all about: that slow, carefree dying, though there are flashbacks to the buoyant and spirited young Iris, with past and present given more or less equal time. The screenplay (by Eyre and Charles Wood) is drawn from Bayley’s two published memoirs of Iris, and now that we have the movie as well as the books, it’s hard to think of a recent passing that has been more fully and lovingly documented. It would amuse Iris to know that people were more interested in making a film about her afterwards than they were in making films of her novels while she was alive. Apart from the Lee Remick version of "A Severed head", I remember a telemovie of "the Bell", but nothing else. (David Stratton [another film reviewer for "The Australian"] thinks "Iris" is like a telemovie too, and I know what he means.)

Judi Dench bears such an extraordinary resemblance to the mature Iris Murdoch that the effect is uncanny, as if she’d been resurrected, or secretly filmed by Eyre before she died, pottering about in her cluttered Oxford rooms, doing the odd domestic chore, giving a lecture, swimming in her favourite bit of the river. The unworldliness comes over (there’s a nice moment in a supermarket when she’s offered "premium points" at the checkout), but so does the humanity. Kate Winslet gives us the flighty, confident, domineering young Iris, and to judge from old dustjacket photos, hers is an equally striking likeness. But, somehow, we feel Winslet’s job is to provide a contrast with Dench, to give greater poignancy to the last years. And these were painful indeed, endured with that blithe indifference, that sweet puzzlement so at odds with the pain felt by others. Dench is unbearably good with repeated words, little flutters of confusion, and later the spells of seclusion on a beach or a cheerful absorption in the "Teletubbies". "Does it matter?" asks Iris when the name of the prime minister escapes her. "Someone will know." As John advises a visitor at one point: "You can say anything you like to her – but make it sound like a joke."

Eyre could have made a more harrowing film, perhaps a more scandalous one, with more attention to Iris’ indiscretions, but he has make a good and truthful film, and he gets to the heart of the tragedy. "Words mean everything to her," says John, and in a lucid moment, before the illness has taken hold, Iris speaks of the inseparability of language and thought. She had difficulty with her last novel – we see her scratching away at her desk – and reviewers were quick to discover inconsistencies in the text. But it’s a wonder she finished it at all. When she still had some of her wits about her, the doctors had already given up. "It’s implacable", says one of them to her face, and we aren’t sure whether Iris knows what he means, or whether she cares.

Jim Broadbent makes a wonderful old duffer as the elderly John: he has a stammer to go with his donnish ways, and when he has to talk silly to his ailing wife, the effect is both funny and painful, as if Iris’ condition were contagious. The small parts are nicely filled: Timothy West and Samuel West as the older and younger versions of "Maurice" (Bowra, I wondered?), a rival Iris admirer; a gushing Eleanor Bron; Hugh Bonneville, adoring and playful as the younger John. I thought of "Hilary and Jackie", another story of an artist ravaged by incurable disease, in which Emily Watson played Jacqueline du Pre, and "Shadlowlands", a no less touching tale of bereavement.

The British have a way with these films. What makes Iris’ story more attractive is that she spent her life wondering about how to be free, how to love, how to do good. It’s a very sad film and a very beautiful one.