By John Anderson (STAFF WRITER)

MOVIE REVIEW

(2 1/2 STARS) IRIS (R). Two-pronged tale of novelist Iris Murdoch, as free-wheeling Oxfordian and Alzheimer's victim. Judi Dench and Kate Winslet are wonderful as Murdoch, but Jim Broadbent steals what is an ultimately anemic movie. With Hugh Bonneville, Penelope Wilton, Juliet Aubrey. Screenplay by Richard Eyre and Charles Wood, from John Bayley's "Iris: A Memoir" and "Elegy for Iris." Directed by Richard Eyre. 90 minutes (sex, nudity, profanity). At Loews Lincoln Cineplex, Manhattan.

THE LAST DAYS of Iris Murdoch are a sad lesson in life's random cruelty. Lionized, much beloved, Murdoch lost her mind before she lost her life - a particularly unkind fate for anyone, but especially a woman ranked among the 20th century's most important English writers, and one of its more independent intellects.

As "Iris" makes abundantly clear - as did the books on which it is based, John Bayley's "Iris: A Memoir" and "Elegy for Iris" - you don't have to have Alzheimer's to be its victim. Eschewing the circumspection of, say, Virginia Woolf's widower, Leonard, Bayley's two books on his late wife give the consort's-eye view of life with troubled, and troubling, literary royalty. In the end, we're not quite sure for whom we're crying.

It might as well be Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, two fine actresses giving terrific performances as Murdoch's older and younger selves, albeit in severely undernourished parts. Although director Richard Eyre moves gracefully and easily (frequently underwater) between his Irises - the young Oxford libertine and budding intellectual; the older novelist, stately, revered and slipping rapidly into mental disintegration - there's not a lot besides the performances to hold on to. Winslet, for whom nudity has never seemed any kind of impediment, is an infectiously ribald character, although she might be any precocious '50s coed - we never get at the root of exactly why Murdoch was so sexually, or for that matter artistically, ahead of her time.

More affectingly, when Dench's Murdoch rifles through her fogging mind as if it were a rusty filing cabinet, there's a sense of her seeing herself from one lonely end of a long, black tunnel.

Ultimately, whom we get to know best is Bayley, who, as a young Oxfordian (Hugh Bonneville), was tortured by Murdoch's bisexual promiscuity, and as an aging gent is bedeviled by her disordered mind. As the older Bayley, Jim Broadbent delivers what we've come to expect, a sensitive, cerebral but humorous interpretation of his plight: The two old intellectuals nervously navigating a modern supermarket is the kind of humanizing element the film might have used more of.

Likewise, the squalid conditions Bayley finds himself in, as Iris becomes too much for him to handle, are incorporated into the story without much exploitation or heavy-handedness. And his annoyance at her following him around, "nudging me like a water buffalo," crosses nicely with his desperation when she wanders off, and his subsequently agonized memory when she's brought home by an old flame.

The love and anger he feels toward her seems honest and real (Murdoch watching "Teletubbies" is something we might have skipped), but while Bayley's sadness/exasperation with a condition he can't control is the most moving thing about "Iris," one walks away feeling it should have been Iris herself. For all the good acting, this film's a bit less than she deserved.