Dame Judi Dench plays the late-in-life Murdoch; Kate Winslet plays her in her vibrant youth. The ever-reliable character actor Jim Broadbent (finally getting the popular attention he has so long deserved) is the older version of John Bayley. All three have turned in Oscar-nominated performances, but to my mind the real find of the film is Hugh Bonneville, the actor portraying the young Bayley. The other leads get all the emotional moments, but Bonneville’s character’s quietly loyal fortitude is every bit as compelling to watch as Dench’s Oscar-alert portrayal of mental decline or Winslet’s hijinks as the young Murdoch.

Kate Winslet, feminine as they come, is simply not right for the vibrant but mannish, steely, almost saturnine Murdoch. Bayley writes that the sexy flame-red cocktail dress Murdoch was wearing at their meeting didn’t suit her; but when the scene appears onscreen, the flashy dress suits the jolly, vital Winslet to a tee. The Big Name Game has triumphed over simply casting the right actor in the role, and the two halves of Murdoch’s story don’t match up. The two women’s constant juxtaposition onscreen is a continual reminder that they resemble one another neither physically nor in their interpretation of Murdoch’s spirit. Winslet’s earthy fieriness almost works, but only Dench has the inner steel of the Iris Murdoch I experience in her fiction, and only Dench can approximate the fixed gaze that peers almost grimly out from Murdoch’s dust-jacket photos. (Bonneville/Broadbent, however, do look and act alike, almost amazingly so, and this provides real continuity.) While both women turn in fine performances, there’s an unsettling dissonance in how they portray what is supposed to be the same woman. When Dench is onscreen, I see Murdoch. When Winslet is onscreen, I see Kate Winslet in Murdoch drag.

But if the two female leads are as alike as two very unlike peas in a pod, the relationship between each couple is equally lovely and believable, though the older couple is really the heart of the film. If this is a love story - and it is - the older couple shows that rarely seen, unglamorous side of love - love as endurance. Murdoch, once a philosopher-novelist, becomes speechless, childlike, trapped in a wordless world. When she remembers enough of herself to wonderingly state to John "I... wrote books," the pride and love in his voice as he beams at her with utter joy and says, "Yes you did, my clever cat!" is enough to make your heart skip a beat.

The younger couple provides charm and innocence (and lets us see the wild young Murdoch, smoking cigarettes and seducing men and women with her physical charms as well as with her magnificent mind), moving all unknowing toward a trial they cannot imagine. The young Bayley always has the same thing to say to upon receiving anything from Murdoch, be it a kiss or the first peep at her soon-to-be-published novel - a movingly sincere "thank you." The absolute respect in his voice as he hands the manuscript back to her shows us the marvelous key to their lifelong relationship - not only did they have romantic and physical love, but also a rigorous and rewarding affair of the mind. He worshiped her, but he also understood her intellectually and admired her mind with a loving fervor that was the admittance into her private world.

The juxtaposition of the young and old Murdoch is painfully effective. Bayley ages but remains himself; Iris ages and mutates into someone wholly new. A scene where the young couple swims in the Thames cuts from the damp and glowing Winslet being patted dry by her doting lover to a red-faced, senile Dench on the bank of the same Thames, screaming in fear and confusion like a bratty, frightened child as Bayley tries to yank a sweater over her head.

One scene strikes a strangely sour note. Murdoch and Bayley visit a friend late in the progression of Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s, and while the distressed Bayley sits around spouting stunningly insensitive and almost self-pitying comments about his disease-addled wreck of a wife, Murdoch rises, goes to her friend, and awkwardly holds her. They sway and begin to slow-dance with an intimate physicality that shames the sneering Bayley. So much of the Murdoch/Bayley relationship was beautiful, or beautifully ordinary, but did the man who wrote books about his brilliant, cherished wife’s decline and death really sit around and proclaim the obvious to friends - that Murdoch was no longer aware of the world around her, and did he rudely do so in her presence? Did he really say such things around her, as if she were an ill-behaved but beloved dog? Bayley is human, imperfect, and suffering greatly, but this scene shows an annoying, self-pitying side of him never again revealed or addressed.

While the movie focuses on the relationship between Murdoch and Bayley in two time periods, we are also meant to mourn the wretched dissolution of Murdoch’s remarkable intelligence. We see Murdoch reading from her work, receiving awards and accolades, but we never see that celebrated mind in action, never see evidence. Aside from a short, humorous philosophical talk Iris gives over the dinner table, we just get lots of reminders that boy, was she ever smart (though, refreshingly, the movie does show us that intellectuals and academics can be earthy people with sex lives and a love of fun). We are set up to mourn something that, unless we bring a pre-existing familiarity with her work to the film, we cannot see.

Iris unsentimentally presents the stages of lasting love: entrancement, commitment, endurance, loss. To my mind, it's significantly flawed, but the performers are fine, the direction compassionate (though the movie is sententiously fraught with symbols), and its story of the end-stages of love one worth hearing. There are so many love stories about the young, showing romance’s beginnings. Iris has the sense and daring to be a love story of the old, and reminds us that even the greatest romance must somehow end.

Jennifer Saylor, March 5, 2002