February 12, 2002

People die the way businesses go bankrupt — gradually, then suddenly. That is also true of Dame Iris Murdoch succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease in Richard Eyre’s beautifully acted film about her final years, based on the memoir by the writer’s husband, John Bayley. The downward curve of her mind is so steep that when a copy of her final novel, Jackson’s dilemma, is put in her hands she has no idea what it is, what she is, who she was.

This is a powerful and affecting film that will contribute to the mythologization of Murdoch’s pitiable decline. Alzheimer’s is something we can all get — ordinary people and literary giants. It occupied a tiny and irrelevant part of Murdoch’s life. Yet due to this disproportionate attention, people might almost think of it as a special “late period” achievement.

Moreover the fact that this movie remembers virtually nothing of Murdoch in her magnificent prime, showing her only as a confused old lady, alternating with the sexy, Zuleika Dobson figure of her Oxford youth, shows how near the film is to suffering from a reverent dementia of its own. But it is, arguably, not about her at all. It should be called “John”, after the man who loved her and nursed her, the sweet-natured soul who willingly had his feelings hurt and became the author of the “Iris” legend for his own ambiguous reasons.

Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent play Iris and John superbly. It is the kind of deeply intelligent acting that is a joy to watch after the dullness and dumbness of so much that traffics across the screen. They are the childless couple who have become each other’s children, living in amiable squalor: soiled teacups, empty gin bottles, books piled all the way up the stairs — the sort of mess cultivated by the absent-minded or very short-sighted. John and Iris wheel their trolley round the supermarket, Iris merrily quibbling at every label: “Wholegrain mustard? But surely any entity is whole?” When John is asked at the checkout if he wants a durable shopping bag, a “bag for life”, he is transfixed by the implications. “Rather!” he chortles.

Playing their younger selves in a series of flashbacks, Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville have the harder job, destined always to be upstaged by the tragic future. The two of them are lumbered with an uncomfortable, heavy-handed piece of “significant” dialogue that opens the film: John and Iris on bikes, John puffing away behind Iris as she whizzes ahead: “I can’t catch up with you! I can’t get hold of you!” — “I’m like Proteus!” And so on.

Yet Winslet nicely conveys Iris’ serene sense of artistic destiny, and Hugh Bonneville shows that, though he gets cast in silly-a-roles, he is a character actor of depth. There is something moving in his renunciation of self, and the way that the stammering swain has to learn to live with Iris’ voracious sexual appetites.

It is when Iris begins her decline that Eyre shows all this flowering into irony and pain. Just as they loved baby talk at the beginning of their life together, so she now watches the Teletubbies. Just as she shut him out of her life in those early days, so she shuts him out again, retreating into dementia and finally silence.

These scenes are almost unbearably sad, but relieved with moments of black comedy as Iris trots around after John in the house, whimpering the freaking out at silly little things.

Inevitably John’s saintly tolerance is replaced by a terrible anger, not entirely explained by stress: “I bloody loathe you, Iris!” For decades she has floated far above John; now he is all she has and must submit to being his mute burden. No man is a hero to his valet, and no literary superstar is entirely a heroine to her spouse-cum-nursemaid. Was there an element of cruelty, even revenge in Bayley’s memoir?

Despite, or more probably because of the enormous calm with which she invests the role, Dench gives a shattering sense of the fear that floods her still conscious mind as Alzheimer’s approaches. It would be tempting to think of her dementia as the final extension of her work — the logical result of Murdoch the philosopher and creator of fastidious moral abstracts reaching out into silence: a Wittgensteinian yearning for that whereof we cannot speak. Alzheimer’s is simply banal; the anguish of those for whom language is everything is not necessarily loftier or more distinguished than it is for others.

Eyre’s movie is touching, if frustrating: it whets an appetite for the articulate, mature Murdoch that must exist somewhere between what her friend A.N. Wilson called the “bonking” and “bonkers” phases. This Iris is surely more compelling than the confused old lady. But the outstanding performances of Dench and Broadbent command attention on their own terms. — Dawn/Guardian news service

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