Iris. Directed by Richard Eyre. A BBC Films, Intermedia, and Miramax film. On general release in the UK from 18 January, in the US from 15 January, in Ireland from 1 February. Rating: ★★★★
The film of Iris Murdoch's life and death from Alzheimer's disease is based on the memoirs of her husband, Professor John Bayley.
It is a beautiful and moving film, a love story told in two parts. The vibrant and permissive Iris draws Bayley, a timid, stuttering, and otherworldly young academic, into her bohemian world. Later she becomes aware that her faculties are disappearing and the couple struggle to maintain some kind of communication. The film interweaves these two stories abruptly throughout in a way that perhaps echoes Iris's later disorganised mind. It is excellently acted by Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent as Murdoch and Bayley in later life and by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville as the young couple.
Iris is neither an educational treatise, nor is it a biography. Instead it is Bayley's remembrance of things past, and contact with medical services is seen in that light. Bayley's thesis is that words are everything and communication is the problem. He castigates the rather cold neurologist for using the impersonal “we,” as in “we don't know the cause.” However, there is little in the film to show why this loss of language should be any more poignant for Iris than for anyone else with Alzheimer's. There are also few examples of her much vaunted genius.
Actors have great difficulty in appearing realistically confused and Judi Dench—great performer that she is—is no different. In the early stages she ends up resorting to the halting “alien/monster learning to speak English” style so beloved of the movies, and does not convincingly demonstrate her bewilderment as the disease progresses.
What is sadly lacking and may distress carers—particularly those looking after people at the early stages of the disease—is any semblance of help or support. The only person who shows any kind of human warmth is the taxi driver persuading Murdoch to leave her house and enter a nursing home. The general practitioner says he is out of his depth. There is no suggestion of a home assessment, a care package, or psychogeriatric referral.
The other medical contact is a neurologist. He is frighteningly matter of fact as he tells the couple that Alzheimer's disease will win. His only role seems to be getting Iris involved in some kind of training video and the inevitable magnetic resonance scan.
It is clear from John Bayley's books that he wanted no help with caring and sought to keep things as they had always been. The film believably portrays why so many carers feel that way. It also brilliantly charts the descent into squalor. Patients with dementia can become unappetising, and seeing the sort of house that I regularly visit displayed on a big screen reminds me of how immune one gets to these surroundings.
This was one man's memoir, a hauntingly poignant story of how a loving relationship, though painful at times, can still bring joy and comfort even when all seems lost. It was not meant as a medical story. It portrayed the natural history of Alzheimer's rather than what I hope is current management. For those of us in the field of dementia care it offers a reaffirmation of what we are doing and why.
Figure.
IMAGE.NET
Judi Dench as Iris: not convincingly bewildered