The Peerless Judi Dench Stars in the Exceptional Iris

The biographical movie Iris isn't really a biographical movie in the typical sense of the term, and that's bound to confuse some people. Its main characters are a couple of married, real-life English writers, novelist Iris Murdoch (Judi Dench) and author and academic John Bayley (Jim Broadbent). And on first glance, the film looks like a typical example of the form?complete with a flashback structure that alternates present-day footage of Murdoch and Bayley with images of the couple in their youth. (In the flashbacks, they're played by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville.) Over the course of a brisk hour and 45 minutes, we learn very little about Murdoch's literary output, her themes, her characters, her reception by the critical establishment and so forth.

Instead, the script, which is based on two memoirs by Bayley, sticks to the relationship between an intelligent, sensible, conservative husband and his brilliant and vastly more daring wife. Dench and Winslet are an unexpectedly apt pairing. Dench is famous for avoiding sloppy sentiment and seizing only on those moments that further ideas; Winslet, who since Titanic has often been cast in emotionally overwrought parts, cools out her performance, lining it up with Dench's, creating a prideful, confident, bold characterization that reminded me less of contemporary actresses than of the hard-edged, crowd-pleasing tough dames of the 30s and 40s: Hepburn, Stanwyck, Davis. As the different incarnations of Bayley, Broadbent and Bonneville match up beautifully with each other, and with their costars.

Mild, decent, easily rattled and perpetually lovestruck, John is the handmaiden to genius?a role typically occupied by a woman in a film about a brilliant man?and there's no resentment in his demeanor. He recognizes his better when he sees her, and he never stops recognizing her, even in old age, when the diamond-hard lucidity that first drew him to Iris is being ground to paste by forces beyond anyone's control. The flashback sequences show Iris rising to the uppermost heights of literary accomplishment and acclaim, while the present-day scenes depict the elderly Iris coping with the onslaught of Alzheimer's, which rages through her mind like a brush fire, eradicating nearly everything she learned that gave her pleasure. (A chilling closeup image of a CAT scan shows the portions of Iris' brain that no longer show evidence of activity; the image suggests infrared footage of a building ravaged by termites.)

What saves the film from depression (at least for some people) is the couple's stoic toughness in the face of a devastating diagnosis. They realize the onslaught of Alzheimer's is the beginning of the end for Iris, so they try to take comfort in rituals: reading, typing, heading to a favorite swimming hole for a quick dip. The swimming hole is a key location, first glimpsed in the film's opening, which alternates images of the young and old versions of the couple swimming together; the sad part is, the old Iris can't appreciate the history of the place because her memory has been scoured by a disease. As played by Dench?peerless as usual?old Iris might as well be taking a dip in a pond for the very first time. In the swimming hole sequences, what Iris won throughout her life and what she lost at the end of it are juxtaposed, and the result is quite moving?unless, of course, you expected a tutorial on the life of Iris Murdoch.

I don't doubt some of Murdoch's fans will cry foul, and accuse writer-director Richard Eyre and cowriter Charles Wood of skimping on the biographical details and delivering a movie that could be about anybody. But I think the fact that Iris could be about anybody is what makes it so powerful. I'll admit up front that I don't have much patience with people who think biographical drama should serve as introductory history courses; their reasons for attacking a biopic that's insufficiently detailed or fact-perfect goes something like, "If the movies don't educate people, who will?" My feeling is, if we've sunk to a point where we're relying on movies to fill in the gaps in our historical or literary education, it's not the fault of movies. Therefore, movies should not be asked to compensate for the failure of the school system or society by snuffing out what makes the medium exciting (drama) and substituting the opposite of excitement (didacticism). Iris rejects its supposed, deeply phony "responsibility" to literature and Murdoch, and does what drama is supposed to do: it illuminates and universalizes one person's experience.

I've seen quite a few films containing characters who suffer from Alzheimer's, and I've watched a few of my relatives succumb to it. I doubt there's an adult anywhere on the planet who doesn't know what the disease looks like. But representing the disease is different from explaining it, and explaining the disease is different from putting it in a dramatic, even poetic context. Iris does all three things exceptionally well; when you watch a mind as sharp as Murdoch's succumb to the brain equivalent of a computer virus that ravages memory, you're not watching a movie-of-the-week; you're watching a tragedy.

The filmmakers put Iris and John's life in context of the things they love the most: words. Then they go a step further and explain what words are, and what language is: an attempt to fix, define and preserve thoughts and emotions. Education elevates words and language to a higher plane, connecting the specific (our life) to the general (everyone else's, past and present).

Can you remember the last time you saw a movie that even dared to address what it means to be educated, much less defended education as the highest achievement of humankind?and took it seriously, as a subject worth exploring and admiring for its own sake, rather than because of the benefits it accrues to its fictional characters? Iris is the only one I can think of; most movies that purport to be about education are really about teachers, or heroes or coming-of-age; they're not about people humbling themselves before words as a holy man humbles himself before God. Iris may not be a religious woman, but when she talks about education (coolly and rationally, thank goodness) she expresses a near-religious awe, even as she acknowledges some things are beyond the reach of the human mind?permanence, for example. "Education is the means by which we realize we are happy," the old Iris insists. The young Iris wisely counters in flashback, "As soon as you try to describe such a feeling, words let you down."

In articulating these ideas, the movie is often merely professional, but occasionally inspired. A marvelous scene near the end has the Alzheimer's-wracked Iris on the beach, ritualistically pinning down pieces of paper with small stones to keep them from blowing away?a metaphor for language's role in human life so basic and right that it pierces the heart. Here, in one moment, we see everything Iris gained and everything she's losing, and everything all humans gain, and will surely lose?to disease or, inevitably, to time.