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Scrappy, heartbreaking 'Iris' glows with life-affirming love
By Jay Carr, Globe Staff
``Iris,'' Richard Eyre's film about the late novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, is one of those rare movies that, over time, deepens its hold and takes root in the mind and heart.
It is the best kind of love story, the kind that's left a little mysterious, especially to the two people in love, and it acknowledges that sometimes love takes the form of simple animal endurance. It's beautifully acted, with ardor, conviction, and heartbreaking softness arising in part from the fact that Murdoch, to whom words meant everything, spent the last few years of her life being undone by Alzheimer's.
Judi Dench gives one of her best performances as the aging Iris: warm, impulsive, honest, fearless, and insulted by life - the insult taking the form of her knowing that she doesn't know, that gaps are appearing in the keen, probing mind that was her glory.
It would be easy to fall into sentimentality, but Dench avoids the pitfalls and claws her way to a modicum of dignity - when she isn't unraveling, that is, or vacant. One of the most touching and life-assertingly madcap moments in the film comes when the elderly Iris opens a car door and tumbles down a riverbank. When her terrified husband, John Bayley, played with exquisite delicacy and loyalty by the incomparable Jim Broadbent, finds her in a clump of bushes, he lies down beside her, limp with relief, while she laughs.
It bookends a parallel moment during a flashback, when the young Iris (Kate Winslet), taking delight in scandalizing her Oxford circle, shows up to a party in a scarlet gown, slips on a staircase, and bumps her way down to the bottom, whooping with laughter while the shy, unworldly student who is to become her husband and companion for nearly half a century stands nervously at the head of the stairs, left behind, timid, and worried.
The film is drawn from Bayley's two memoirs about life with his wife, and it makes no effort to conceal the fact that he was always several steps behind her - intellectually, sexually, personality-wise. Part of the reason ``Iris'' is so potent and touching is the seamless way the aged Iris is played against her rampantly vibrant younger self.
Winslet doesn't really resemble Dench, but she's such a courageous actor that she turns out to be perfect as the young Iris, who was as shy and secretive as she was flamboyant. What's touching is the way she feels unthreatened by the John of, first, Hugh Bonneville, and then Broadbent, who's human enough to blow up at Iris once in a while, but who loves her dearly and stays with her almost until the end.
We can feel the heat and urgency of their youth (it came mostly from Iris), also the comfortable-as-old-pussycats camaraderie they share in later life, and finally the reversal of roles, as Alzheimer's steals Iris from herself and John and their lives slide into disarray.
As Iris's personality is increasingly lost, gentle John becomes the stronger one, and they find themselves sharing a stark emotional purity in which even the spoken sentences suggest stony Samuel Beckett-like strings of irreducible essence.
Eyre, who collaborated with Charles Wood on the screenplay, also brings a feathery touch to the enterprise, even in scenes where the symbolism easily could have blown the poignancy off the screen, as when blank pages are seen blowing down a beach, sheets of possibility lost forever.
Thankfully, the film never plays like an official biography. It's scrappy, intimate, unruly, life-asserting, even funny, and filled with cumulative impact. Its subjective, impressionistic approach turns out to have been an inspired one.
``Iris'' glows with rightness and convinces us we're sharing its characters' understanding that when the books and the memory go, love can remain. Tone is always the most difficult thing to capture in conveying the life of a person, much less a believably rendered shared life. The tender, beautifully burnished ``Iris'' gets it right.
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