(2001) For only the second time in the history of the Academy Awards a pair of actresses was nominated for an Oscar for playing the younger and older versions of the same character in the same film; both times, in this movie and in Titanic (1997), Kate Winslet had the younger role for the dual-nomination.

Another movie that opens with a liquid scene of water, fluid - The Sea, the Sea - flooding and drying up, a first-class mind deteriorating from Alzheimer's disease: "I feel as if I'm sailing into darkness." Based on the books of Dame Iris Murdock's husband John Bayley, a professor of literature and novelist, Iris: A Memoir and Elegy for Iris, co-screenwriter (with Charles Wood) and director Richard Eyre portrays the English philosopher, dramatist, and author of 26 novels as a young woman (Kate Winslet) with a secret world in her head for her fiction and as a confused crone (Judi Dench) - "She's in her own world now" - employing scenes that are hinged between the latter half of 1950s and the last of the 1990s, opening and closing upon each other, until her death in 1999 at 79.

The couple, who would remain childless, met at Oxford in 1956 - bicycling downhill, she urges him to hold tight to her like Hercules to the shape-shifting Proteus - but the film never convinced me as to why Iris ("You must accept me as I am"), who's had several lovers (possibly lesbian affairs as well), fell in love with the stuttering, awkward, naïve, sexually inexperienced Bayley (High Bonneville).

There's no mention of her Marxist associations during the 1930s or her political views, only an aphoristic ambiguity: "There is only one freedom of any importance, freedom of the mind." Having earlier stated in a lecture that words are insufficient for the truth, to her elderly husband (Jim Broadbent) Iris, experiencing writer's block, memory lapses, and puzzlement over spellings, says: "We all worry about going mad, don't we?"

Her books (none of which I've read, though her first published work, Under the Net, is regarded by some critics as among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century) were explorations of "how to be free, how to be good, how to love." She says that goodness and love are worthy of divinity without the necessity of God.

Speaking at the funeral service of their friend Janet Stone (Penelope Wilton and Juliet Aubrey as the younger), John's farewell is more for Iris, incomprehensible to his words, in the audience. Her young physician, Dr Gudgeon confirms, "The lights will go out," and then before getting her admitted to Vale House tells John: "More difficult to get into than Eton."

Among Iris's friends and John's potential rival, Maurice Charlton is played by Sam West as a younger man and his father Timothy West four decades later.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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