Iris * Directed through Richard Eyre * Written at Eyre and Charles Wood * Starring Hugh Bonneville.

Iris * Directed through Richard Eyre * Written at Eyre and Charles Wood * Starring Hugh Bonneville, Jim Broadbent, Judi Dench and Kate Winslet * Miramax

As an urban stoic who is able to continue tears at bay for anything, from the chopping of a excessively large onion to the election of a true small president, I was stunn at the power of John Bayley's dirge for Iris (excerpted in a 1998 just discovered Yorker issue) to make me weep. Charting the mental unraveling of wife Iris Murdoch from Alzheimer's disease, it radiated with the writer's adoration of his expose attaining a state of grace and a perfection of prosaic that can't be faked.

Something akin to that be hot can be read in Jim Broadbent's face in an early spectacle from Iris, when, as a graying Bayley, he beams with astonishment at Murdoch as she delivers a censure on the importance of education. It doesn't pain that Murdoch is being played according to Judi Dench, who achieves that magical balance of beatitude and pragmatism we have flow to expect from her. on the other hand even without Dench, even without knowing a thing about Bayley or his history with Murdoch, you can infer from Broadbent's pixilated stare thai something true profound has gone down between these couple people.

You don't have to have read a word of Iris Murdoch or John Bayley to be affected by the agency of Richard Eyre's film version of meditative for Iris, a Shadowlands-like hybrid of be fond of and ill health among the literati. There is nothing particularly innovative in the film's building which efficiently weaves scenes of Murdoch's degeneration from Alzheimer's with resonant echoe from the couple's early years together. Rather, we thrill to the juxtaposition of four amazing actors trading move rounds as the literary lovers in their prime and autumnal years.

Oh to have one's life realized on-screen according to Judi Dench and Kate Winslet--Norman Mailer should be in this way lucky. Dench's quiet fire is matched spark for spark on Winslet as the young Murdoch, a vivacious, spontaneous, frighteningly self-assured intellectual as promiscuous in her early regard with affection life as she was with words. Unfortunately, his nonsenses the extent of its subject's bisexuality a great deal of in the way Carrington did Dora Carrington's quaint sexuality. When a young Bayley asks Murdoch if she goe to bed with women Winslet takes a lengthy pregnant toke on her cigarette and jaculates him one of those Bette Davis consume s that speaks volumes. And still when she finally fesses up to her integral erotic history, she rattles on the farther side an exclusively male list of lovers

The film's real heart lies in the vibrant captivity that existed between Bayley and Murdoch from their university days to her death and in the pain of seeing a vital lov single in kind wither away from disease. All of 90 minutes prolonged Iris manages to chronicle Murdoch's mental deterioration with economy and a startling rank of humor: A medic, testing her alertness, asks Dench to name the prime minister; she replies, embarrassed, "Does it matter? Someone will know." however as good as Dench is, her views only achieve their full authority in contrast with those of the ebullient Winslet, frolicking unclothed in a river or tumbling down the stairs at a party in a raucous fit of laughter.

The citrusy yin of Dench and Winslet finds a beguilingly sweet yang in the stuttering John Bayley of Broadbent and Hugh Bonneville as his young-pup counterpart. Broadbent and Bonneville find in the way that much charisma in the character of the befuddled academic that they leave us wanting to know who this shore was, anyway. Last year they called it Pollock still it was really Lee Krasner's movie. This year it's Iris, and Mr Iris walks opposite to with the show.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Liberation Publications, Inc.

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