Posted: 01/24/2002

Iris

(2002)

by Parama Chaudhury

Avoiding the feel-good sentimentality of certain other recent films about mental illness, Iris is ultimately saved by its amazing cast.

It is incredibly hard to make an interesting movie about a literary icon’s life, much less one based on an adoring husband’s recollections. Still, Iris somehow manages to hold its head above water. The main reason for this is the exceptional acting talent channeled into an otherwise uninspired project. Judi Dench and Kate Winslet hold their own as the old and young Iris, respectively, while Jim Broadbent as the old John Bayley, critic and husband to Iris, delivers a sympathetic and suitably low-key performance.

I’m not sure why any director would want to take on a film like this. Based on Bayley’s memoirs of Iris Murdoch and her descent into Alzheimer’s disease, the film is in great danger of slipping into maudlin excesses or becoming a glorified elegy. What should the focus be? The growing power of the disease over a brilliant mind? Iris as a writer? Or the development of a loving relationship between two such different people? The director, Richard Eyre, makes a wise decision and focuses on Iris’s legendary infatuation with words, and shows how she eventually retreats into a wordless dreamworld where she sings old tunes and picks up on a repeated word here and there. In the first part of the movie, the switching between the young and energetic Iris plucking words out of the air, playing with them, composing elaborate symphonies with them, and then letting them go, and the older Iris lecturing on education or on love builds the foundation. This is the journey this woman has made, with words and her faithful husband as her companions. We understand why the disease is so terrifying for this woman, just like a heart condition must be to a sprinter. If her world of words collapses, there is very little left for her.

Once the Alzheimer’s has set in, the flashback to young Iris seems pointless. We remember the woman for what she was: the first half of the movie has told us with dexterity. The onset of the disease should be a cue for us to redirect our attention to the relationship between Iris and her other companion: loyal, slightly dotty John. Instead of this, the director insists on taking us back to fresh-faced, word-spouting, libidinous Iris. But Iris has come a long way from that! The older Iris has a more mature understanding of the role words play in our life. It is this revelation that she is losing to Alzheimer’s, and it is this loss that is heartbreaking both for us, and for those who love her and have seen her at her creative best.

Now for the best part: the acting. First of all, in spite of the fact that even frumpy-haired Kate Winslet is probably much more beautiful than the young Iris, while Judi Dench embodies the appropriately plain British intellectual, the two mesh superbly to portray a complex artist. Winslet’s Iris is precocious, but she is intelligent enough to appreciate Bayley’s goodness, and to contrast it with the essential insincerity of her “set”. She doesn’t quite appear to be an intellectual with promise, but she seems bright enough to develop into the perceptive wordsmith that Dench plays. Dench, as usual, is perfect. At first, as the older Iris, she has the quiet air of someone who has been seduced by the pull of words but has realized their power to destroy as well as build, and now handles each thought, each sentence gingerly. Whether or not the real Iris had such an epiphany, Dench gets inside the skin of a passionate writer so well that we want to believe that this, indeed, was one of the foremost literary figures of the twentieth century. Broadbent, as the older Bayley, is less of a stuttering ingénue than Hugh Bonneville’s young Bayley, and this makes him real as the critic, who has a low standing in the world of writers, but is nevertheless an astute observer.

The most important contribution of this film as a biopic is its intimate scope. Real people’s lives tend to very run-of-the-mill at the end of day, even if they were famous writers in their prime. The way we get to know Iris and John, and the low-key existences they suffer through, make them real, and their story comes alive in the little details of their everyday lives. The fact that this story doesn’t have a happy ending — Iris never gets better — helps its case. There are many other films based on real-life stories making the rounds, which celebrate their subject’s life in such resplendent colors that they seem incomplete without an ending where good triumphs over evil (or the bad things that happen to good people). Iris’s strength comes from its recognition that life happens. At the same time, while there are several redeeming features in this movie, if I were a director, I would take Iris as a lesson: even if you get the actors and the angle, it’s nearly impossible to make a great movie about a literary figure’s life. If you focus on a single event, which has little to do with their writing, you might be able to get away with it. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Parama Chaudhury is a graduate student, an ex-writing instructor and a budding freelance writer, based in New York City.

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