IRIS
UK, 2001, 91 minutes, Colour.
Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet, Hugh Bonneville, Eleanor Bron, Angela Morant, Penelope Wilton, Juliet Aubrey, Joan Bakewell, Kris Marshall, Samuel West.
Directed by Richard Eyre.
Dame Iris Murdoch was a novelist and a philosopher, one of the most acclaimed of 20th century British authors. However, her books have not been adapted for the screen. She was a lover of words and ideas rather than images. Her highest priority during her career was 'thought'. It now comes as something of a surprise to find her as the subject of a feature film - and so soon after her death.
However, it is not her ideas that are being dramatised here. There is some acknowledgement in the screenplay that she explored notions of freedom. There are some quotations from her lectures. At the end of the film, she declares that love is the most important thing in our lives, much more than reason which she admired so much. Although she declares that she does not believe in a God, she recites from Psalm 139 about the transcendent in our lives and about the presence of love.
Iris offers a number of interesting perspectives. There is the older Iris before she is lost in her Alzheimer's condition. There is the contrast with the young Iris, the seemingly intellectual flibertigibbert. But, there is no picture of the Iris in-between to help us understand how the younger grew and developed into the older. It is left to the audience to do what so many literature exam questions ask us to do, 'Compare and contrast'.
In this we are helped immeasurably by the fine performances. Kate Winslet appears as the younger, brash, free-spirited and free-wheeling Iris. She portrays her as uninhibited, especially in fleeting relationships, a woman of verve who is unexpectedly attracted to a stammering, balding young academic whom she eventually marries, John Bayley.
Judi Dench is Iris Murdoch. Long acknowledged as one of the finest of British stage actors, in recent years, Dame Judi has given us a number of screen performances that display her versatility. One thinks of her as Queen Victoria, 'Mrs Brown', as Queen Elizabeth I in her Oscar-winning role in Shakespeare in Love. She was in Chocolat and The Shipping News. She has shown another side of her skills as M in each of the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films. She is Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.
Judi Dench's ability to show Iris Murdoch as a tough-minded and committed writer and lecturer as well as portray her bewilderment at the gradual onset of the disease, her life at home, wandering and lost, and at a nursing home gives us a memorable and sympathetic experience of what ageing and illness are like for a person and those around them.
The other strength of the film is in the character of John Bayley. The screenplay is based on his memoirs, of his life with Iris Murdoch and of his love for her during her final years. Hugh Bonneville is convincing as the younger John and is made to resemble closely the older John, played by another extraordinarily versatile actor, Jim Broadbent (Topsy Turvy, Moulin Rouge, Bridget Jones's Diary). Broadbent won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Bayley is seen as a shy man, rather swept off his feet by Iris, devoted to her and proud of her. He is also shown in desperate moments when he is at the end of his tether caring for his wife.
The initial impression of Iris in the film is that she is an intellectual. She delivers an after-dinner speech on the importance of freedom, a concept she has explored in her fiction and non-fiction writing. There is quite a deal of discussion about her respect for 'thought' and for language as the vehicle for thought. She is a woman of reason. She is a lover of words. Whatever type she might have identified with in real life, Iris Murdoch is being presented in the film as a strong thinking-function woman. Her speech is abstract, cerebral. As a writer of fiction she is also presented as more intuitive.
However, in the scenes that follow, where we see the young Iris, we might be led to believe that she is much more feeling, an outgoing flirt with both men and women. She is unembarrassed while swimming nude. She seems to be almost totally involved in the here and now.
Some reviewers have found difficulty in coming to terms with the film's portrait of Iris and this rather sweeping contrast between the young and the old. Perhaps they are saying that the two parts seem so inconsistent that we really are not given an interpretation of Iris that makes sense. The gap is too large. We need to see something of Iris in the intervening years.
In reply, the writers might say that they indicated the continuity in her life and character in more subtle ways, that the real Iris was always the thoughtful and imaginative woman under the young and flighty surface. After all, she had already written her first novel. She was already talking about concepts of freedom. And, despite her many friends and partners, she was always attracted to the bumbling John, saw a solidity and security in him that led her to commit herself to a lifetime with him.
Finally, as in the Ron Howard's film about Nobel prizewinning schizophrenic mathematician, John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, the intellectual comes to realise that completion is in the complementarity of thinking and feeling: the intellectual who values reason and the mind comes to learn the transcendent experience of the heart and love.
1. Audience interest in and knowledge of Iris Murdoch? As an academic, philosopher? As a novelist, her ideas, interest in thinking, issues of freedom, transcendence? Her life, career, her marriage, Alzheimer’s, the city, homes, the work world of academia, socials? Oxford over the decades? The musical score?
2. The structure of the film: establishing the older years of the characters, moving back, the young characters – and the interconnections?
3. The focus on Iris, young, wild, her character, relationships and affairs, friendship with Janet and Maurices? With John Bayley? Her potential – but no real indication of what she was to become? A personable but puzzling character?
4. John Bayley as younger, Oxford, Iris? His marrying her? The older John, the deterioration of his wife, his support of her, the Alzheimer’s, the effect on him, the detail of his care?
5. Janet and Maurice, young, friendships, relationships? Later?
6. Iris as older, authoritative, her reputation, her novels and their impact, her emphasis on thinking, the value of thought, recent, abstraction? Freedom, not believing in God but reciting the psalm? Transcendence? Her own behaviour, uninhibited, relationships, the nude swimming, discussions and arguments?
7. Iris and the media, interviews, BBC, personnel?
8. The onset of the onset of Alzheimer’s, the effect on Iris, her deterioration physically, mentally, the nursing home? Her dependence on John? Leading to her death? And the picture of care, Love infidelity on the part of John?
