Iris (2001)

But the two John Bayley actors were superb, purely sublime, especially Broadbent who won an AA for his supporting role. I find Winslet and Dench both unappealing and harsh, with zero charisma or star-quality, and I consider both to be vastly over-rated. The film seemed to me like a documentary. Not sure that it's a good idea to do a flick with the main character going through declining mental ability, struck me as unkind and nasty. I rate it 4/10. NB: Great to see an orchestra aping Harry James's wonderful "Cherry Pink". Costumes and sets very fine.

Well, as of my submission there will be 136 reviews of this movie. Which just goes to show that in our time of semi-education, where millions have gone to college to little effect except to have the concept of celebrity imposed on supposed intellectuals; it is preferable to the masses to watch a movie about Iris Murdoch rather than read or--what is more likely--dabble in her while sipping lattes at the Barnes and Noble. That is to say, I understand why this depressing and incoherent movie has gotten so much attention! But I couldn't finish it! (And I like Judi Dench.) John Bayley was portrayed as a male bimbo--a scholarly and compliant cuckold, so silly in his puppy dog willingness to accept her infidelities, that one wonders how he could have become a don. (Were they all so weak and ineffectual at that time?) What Iron-maiden Murdoch saw in him is beyond me; yet, on second thought, he is probably the sort of, what we would call, metro-sexual figure that might fit in quite well with her self-consciously styled alpha-female personality. Somewhat pedestrian for the learned and profound Iris, if you ask me.In that vein I think that all of Iris' years were years of decline. She just had to be sexually promiscuous and something of an exhibitionist. Ditto the communism. And the Sartre too! And her assaults on bourgeois traditions and morality. All the trendy intellectual thumb twiddling of the post-war era. In any period, I just do not like people of her genre. if she had been born 25 years earlier she would have been a Vita Sackville-West or, worse, a Virginia Woolf. The traction these writers have retained is almost wholly due to modern feminism. Ditto Murdoch. That the reader may gauge my reference point, I find Dorothy Sayers to be incomparably better as well as more friendly and reassuring. Sayers learned from her mistakes and was comfortable with her sex. Murdoch was a woman who was not happy with her lot--being a woman, that is.So to endure to the end a movie whose end was an ending from the very beginning and to focus on the dregs of the end of the end as does this movie; the bitter, slobbering attempts of a miserable creature--unaware of herself in so many ways and unable to retain enough memory to put together the lessons she should have learned--to hold together her human identity; all the while clawing and resisting the booby of a man who shared her bed for over 40 year--well, I could see the finale.

IrisA film about Irish Murdoch, renown British writer, who of Alzeihmer's and old age died. This is predominantly a story about love. Irish Murdoch marries John Bayley and they live a life together, until she dies. Rather simple, and rather straightforward. No surprises in this movie, and yet it is very beautiful one. One would think that to love is beyond words. But not for Iris. Her life evolved around words, and she famously said: "Without words, how can one think?" and yet she lost the ability to speak and think the way we do as she grew old. A rather ironic turn of events. But the story needed to be told. The love of John Bayley for Iris, throughout their young years until their old age was one that needed to be told. It goes without staying that with the heavy stardom of this movie, with the likes of Kate Winslet, Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent, acting is superb throughout. Take for example the scene where John& Iris return from the house of the man who was not the chosen by Iris as her boyfriend. John is rather disappointed that he has not read Iris' new book and says so as they walk back through the sunny street. Iris then turns on the threshold of her house, with a look of fear in her eyes, and doubt, and this is beautifully played. Or during the rather touching moments of John swimming in the ocean with his clothes on. What is more funny and cute than that, that shows love and simplicity and the joy of life?For the faint-hearted, this may bring some tears to your eyes, and for the rest, apart from the imbeciles that would actually not like this movie (not the ones that'd get bored, that I may understand) but who'd genuinely not like it, well, that is your problem, because a story has never been so nicely played out in its simplicity and with little words, in contrast to Iris' prolific writing.No reason to put stars for this movie, we are not in class anymore. Go see it! You will not be disappointed, and you will love it!

This screen biography of Iris Murdoch flashes back and forth between her twilight years as she battles Alzheimer's disease and her life as an aspiring writer in the 1950s. The casting is uncanny - it's totally believable that Winslet and Bonneville would age into Dench and Broadbent, respectively. The acting is also quite good, particularly Broadbent as the supportive but long-suffering husband of the woman who enjoyed a sexually adventurous life, a role that won him an Oscar. The problem is that there isn't much to the script other than mundane scenes of life then and now. Without a compelling plot to tie it all together, the film fails to sustain interest despite its short length.