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IRIS Send This Review to a Friend
If you want to see acting that soars, don't miss "Iris." It's a sad film and it couldn't be otherwise. This is the story of writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, both in the glory of her youth and the tragic years when her once-brilliant mind disintegrated as a result of Alzheimer's. It also the story of how her loyal husband, John Bayley, on whose memoirs the film is based, endured his own pain of caring for her and watching her become a mental cipher and finally die.
We meet Murdoch on different levels, as a winsome, free-spirited young intellectual played by Kate Winslet, who gives the best performance of her career, and by the magnificent Judi Dench, playing the mature Murdoch when she was revered and respected and then showing her gradual decline. Dench breaks our hearts in the latter phase, just as Iris broke the heart of her husband. Jim Broadbent is nothing short of magnificently touching as the older Bayley. He's played engagingly by Hugh Bonneville in the romantic phase of the couple's early life at Oxford in the 1950s, when Bayley was an awkward young man who had trouble expressing his ardor for Iris, the more aggressive of the two and a woman who already had more experience with life and lovers.
Director Richard Eyre handles the early scenes with utter charm, as does the intelligent and sensitive screenplay he wrote with Charles Wood. My one quibble with the film is that there is too much arty back-and-forth inter-cutting between time periods. We get the picture of the wonderful early days without the need for them to be so repetitive. But that's the sort of criticism one makes in good conscience of a film that otherwise is so wonderful. In any event, it is the acting that drives the drama, which does justice to a remarkable woman and a remarkable man and makes for remarkable cinema. A Miramax Films release.
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