By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * * )
Two nations separated by a common language, Winston Churchill called them, and the gulf between American and British film-making is underlined by the recent Oscar-winner A Beautiful Mind and this English biopic.
In A Beautiful Mind, director Ron Howard uses mathematician John Forbes
Nash's voyage through paranoid schizophrenia to get his audience to a happy Hollywood ending. In Iris, London theatre director Richard Eyre portrays novelist Iris Murdoch "sailing into darkness" — the bleak reality of her hopeless struggle with Alzheimer's disease.
Murdoch (1919-1999) was one of the most important and prolific British novelists of the past century. She wrote and taught philosophy as well. She wrote 28 novels on "the unique strangeness of human beings"; the search for happiness, the nature of goodness, the meaning of love.
After her death, John Bayley, her husband, also an academic and the foremost literary critic of his day, wrote two books that deal frankly and compassionately with her disease.
Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent give remarkable performances as the ageing, childless couple, living among soiled teacups, empty gin bottles, books piled up the stairs.
Playing the younger version in flashbacks are Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville — Iris the serene artist, John the shy student who has to learn to live with his wife's voracious appetite for other men and women.
As others have noted, there is a yawning gulf in this film — the years that represent the prime of their lives are missing, the years that represent the moulding of this marriage and the cementing of Murdoch's literary importance.
But you will remember this film for Dench/Iris' haunting descent into her closed-off world, the difficulty of writing her final novel, loss of memory, inability to read, incontinence, watching the Teletubbies.
Rental video, DVD: Today
• DVD features: movie (90min); introduction by David Hyde Pierce; two short features, A Look At Iris and an Alzheimer's Association award for the movie and Jim Broadbent.
