Iris
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Movie Reviews of Iris
Movie Review: A 10-STAR MOVIE!
Summary: 5 Stars
Dame Judi Dench can play anything! Her portrayal of this character was so very powerful. In actuality, all three major stars - Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, and Kate Winslet - were amazing. I highly recommend this movie, especially if you are a Judi Dench fan.Movie Review: Touching
Summary: 5 Stars
Very powerful and touching video. An hour an a half of superb acting and all I can remember is the few brief moments of Kate Winslet skinny dipping. Kind of wanted to join her, though I would have preferred a swimming pool over the murky waters of the river.Movie Review: Awesome - try having loved Alzheimer's people in your life
Summary: 5 Stars
10 stars - not to scare the matinée crowd here - but this is an awesome, perfect recreation of how it happens. If anything, it pulls punches a little on how the family & friends need to & can "help".Movie Review: Enjoyable Thoughtful Film about Two authors in Love
Summary: 4 Stars
Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999) was a prolific author and philosopher having written twenty-seven works of fiction, five philosophical books, six plays and two books of poetry. Her novel, The Sea, the Sea, won the 1978 Booker Prize. The film, Iris, is based on two of her husband John Bayley's books about her life -- Iris: A Memoir and Elegy for Iris. It covers approximately 40 years from her early courtship with John, a novelist and an English professor, until her death.
The focus of this story is Iris and John's relationship and their mutual love of words. It follows the course of their rocky courtship and lovely philosophical discussions to the repetitiveness and forgetfulness that invades Iris's words, facial recognition and then beloved activities like swimming, dressing and ultimately writing, as she begins to exhibit telltale signs of Alzheimer's.
The movie opens with a young couple (Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville) swimming deeply in murky water. The young forms merge into older ones (Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent) and this is pretty much how the film deals with time by switching back and forth between the here and now and lost memories.
Iris was a philosopher so it's not surprising to see many philosophical ideas brought to fusion. This romantic film makes the viewer think a little afterwards. That is if you're listening to the words. Otherwise they can pass so quickly and be easily forgotten. One of these ideas is education and its individual worth. Can it in stow happiness in the bearer. And whether it is better to have "freedom of the mind or an educated mind".
A similar idea is our attachment to words. "If one doesn't have words, how does one think?" There's an ongoing discussion on the importance of language and being able to communicate one's thoughts. If one can't write then one can't think which leads to thinking of Iris, the writer; if Iris can't think Iris can't write. If she can't live without thinking she can't live without writing. One of Iris's greatest fears was going mad because she considered herself one of those people who lived in their minds. When she is stricken with memory losses John is constantly trying to get her to write, thinking perhaps if she can't write then she won't lose her beautiful mind.
According to the film, Iris believed that love is the only language that anybody understands. Iris was not a woman to be contained. She said what she thought and did what she wanted when she wanted often making it difficult for John to accept. But through it all he continued to love her. The film expands the concept of what love means and what it could mean to different people. Unconditional love is a recurring theme within the movie as Iris and John's relationship is continually tested.
In another early scene John and Iris are racing down a road on bikes. Iris pulls ahead of him and he yells after her, "I can't catch up with you!" This feeling is consistent throughout their relationship whether they are on the bike or not. Near the end John constantly searches for signs of the woman he knew. Once her disease takes hold the film becomes emotionally moving and I was brought both to tears and fear of mind; especially by John's reactions, both positive and negative. He begins to move through the grieving process long before she dies. One line he says in particular brought this home for me, -I use to be so afraid of being alone with you. And now I can't be without you.-
Jim Broadbent won a well deserved Oscar for his role in 2002 for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal of John Bayley and it is well deserved. I also thought Hugh Bonneville's (young Bayley) performance is particularly notable and the likeness between him and Broadbent is amazing. Winslet and Dench are superb actors in their own right but there was nothing extraordinary about their performance other than their ability to meld with the other actors. Which I think is often as important as telling the story. In other words they weren't bigger than the parts they played.
Iris is a heartbreaking love story about human love and the love words and thinking. I didn't see this film as a story about Alzheimer's, the word isn't even mentioned. It is more about the loss the parties involved experience. It provided a troubling look into two author's lives and peaked my interest in reading Murdoch works. If you have a love for literary artists and their lives then you'll enjoy this thoughtful film. Reviewed by M. E. Wood.
Movie Review: "Nothing matters except loving what is good." --Iris Murdoch
Summary: 4 Stars
When I saw that this DVD comes with an Alzheimer's-themed PSA featuring David Hyde Pierce, and a clip from an Alzheimer's Association honors ceremony, I feared that this might be one of those movies in which the disease is the star. But as Pierce and Jim Broadbent hasten to point out, this movie is not so much about Alzheimer's as it is about love. It is also about how to be free and how to be good. Surely it is no coincidence that those are the three themes Iris claims for her first novel early in the movie.That Iris would list a series of abstractions in answer to the question "What is your novel about?" illustrates her evident preference of ideas to people. Even her sexual affairs seem motivated less by an interest in sex than by an interest in the intellects of those she has sex with. She seems to consider sex itself - hence sexual fidelity as well - rather trivial.
The strength of this movie, however, is its focus on the people themselves. What makes the onset of Alzheimer's especially tragic here is not that a person has a terrible disease, but that THIS person has THIS disease. She who claimed publicly that "there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever - that of the mind" is shown gradually losing her mind. And her husband, who no doubt fell in love with her for her intellect as well as for her exuberance and spontaneity, must suffer as he sees all of that slipping away.
John, in fact, is the real protagonist of this movie. It is he who remains aware of all that is happening to Iris and who is faced with choosing to be good and choosing to love. He certainly thinks his own suffering is greater than hers, claiming that she has no idea whether or not she's being made fun of, and saying at one point, "She's in her own world now. It's perhaps what she's always wanted." To John, Alzheimer's is the final grim suitor who snatches Iris away long after he thought he had triumphed over all the others.
A situation like the one this movie portrays is already so rife with emotions that we in the audience are expected to have that there's little need to manipulate us with the music and cinematography. Occasionally this movie does that, as in the scene where Iris jumps from the moving car as the music swells, and John is suddenly seen from a worm's-eye view, chasing after her. For the most part, though, the photography remains very stark, the music suitably subdued.
Both Kate Winslet and Dame Judy Dench have that combination of articulateness and self-confidence that projects a powerful intelligence on screen, absolutely essential in portraying a character like Iris Murdoch. Hugh Bonneville and Jim Broadbent are so much alike in their portraits of John Bayley that I had to check the credits to be sure that these were indeed two different people. Sure enough, there was a fourth star, unjustly left out of all the praise justly heaped on the other three. I did notice that both actors' stutters come and go, but for all I know that may be accurate, and at least it isn't obtrusive. The actors both come across as gentle and likeable here, yet I found myself wondering if that was enough to make Iris want to marry John. Judging from this movie, I would guess that what most appealed to her was his sheer dogged devotion. John may do his share of complaining, but he nevertheless sticks around.