Iris


Starring Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet, Hugh Bonneville. Written by Richard Eyre and Charles Wood. Directed by Richard Eyre.

Iris Murdoch (Winslet) is a star student at Oxford in the 1950's. She has a book she has just written about to be published that she has allowed none of her friends to read. She meets a shy, bumbling fellow student John Bayley (Bonneville) who falls for her and who she likes to be with. But Iris is also friends with a lot of people, especially older men, and has a large appetite for sex with both females and older men. Iris becomes a famous novelist who wins the Booker Prize, among many other prizes, and Bayley becomes a Wharton English professor who also writes several books of his own.

Transfer forward to the mid 90's, and Iris (Dench) is finishing her last book. John is still writing a bit, but as time goes by Iris is forgeting things, and repeating things she has said just moments earlier. Soon she can't remember many of her friends, and becomes a fearful, needy person requiring constant care, who takes John beyond his limits in trying to care for her.

Featuring three Oscar-nominated performances and one more equally as good as the others, Iris concentrates more on Iris Murdoch's slipping into Alzheimer's disease, and much less on her life, and the mystery of her relationship with John Bayley and her personal views and writings. The film gives no hint as to why the free-spirited, popular Murdoch would be attracted to the bookish, clumsy Bayley. After Bayley discovers Murdoch having affairs with both men and women, Murdoch tells him he just has to accept her the way she is. Several times she talks about goodness and what it constitutes, and continual affairs don't exactly jibe with that. Bayley is portrayed as a fawning doormat who worships her and anything she does. We know nothing of what she did between the 50's and the 90's, such as dabbling with the Communist Party and the United Nations and refugees camps. In the old age segment, Bayley cries out he's never really known her or how her mind works, her secret inner world. The audience is not invited to know either.

The film zips back and forth between the 50's when Iris first meets Bayley and her old age, and that feature of the film works well. The film begins with a the younger Iris and John swimming naked in a stream, and moves seamlessly into the older couple enjoying each other's company in the same swimming hole of their youth. The actor's have been well chosen, not only because each one is outstanding, but becasue Winslet resembles Dench quite well, and Bonneville and Broadbent look and act uncannily alike. As I mentioned before, all four performers are stellar, but for my money, Broadbent and Bonneville shine brightest.

Iris is a wonderfully performed, but ultimately disappointing biography of a free-spirited author, which works well at illustrating the debilitating effects of Alzheimer's but not well at informing us about Iris Murdoch.




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