In her youth, Iris Murdoch lived by words, generously caressing intellects by rolling brilliant phrases from her lips and pen.
In the film "Iris," directed by Richard Eyre, her aging mind becomes the celebrated British novelist's greatest weakness. Suddenly cast into a foreign world of silence and confusion, the audience must search along with her faithful husband to find a lasting scent of Iris separate from her deteriorating psyche.
Judi Dench plays the elderly Iris, who first slowly, then quickly succumbs to the mental blackness that is Alzheimer's. Dench manages a seamless character alteration by fading Iris's precise confidence to a foggy state plagued by constant confusion.
It is the craftily juxtaposed scenes, however, that catch the straggling audience off guard. Eyre reveals Iris to the audience by threading the present with the past in a series of modern experiences and youthful flashbacks.
The fluid method allows the viewer a glimpse of the private Iris that often evaded her peers. While struggling with her disease, she is at the same time her former self -- alive, breathing and spouting praises of love, freedom and knowledge.
Winslet creates a unity with Dench beyond the careful splicing of the scenes. She long ago abandoned the constraining corset donned in "Titanic" to act in her own skin. She uses the strength of her imperfections -- her broad curves and honest face -- to glow with a reality and passion that redefines that previous assumption of flashbacks as merely yellowed newspaper clippings put to screen. Iris's past life is more vibrant than the present, emerging as the main conflict and struggle of the film.
Esteemed British character actor Jim Broadbent plays Iris's friend, lover and husband, John Bayley. Trailing her from the onset of the film he struggles to keep up with her intriguing intellect, numerous liaisons and sexual indulgences.
In the present, however, he suddenly finds himself lost and unable to guide his life-long teacher and instructor. He searches madly for the "state of grace" that they once had -- a love based on the union of minds.
It is difficult for those of us grounded only in the physical to imagine. What happens to two minds joined by words and weighted by philosophy when thoughts disappear?
Broadbent's character, John, is frustrated and weak, still plagued by feelings of inadequacy sprung from Iris's past life of a million friendships and lovers. A mere fallback for her in his eyes, he eventually becomes the sole man to witness the inner workings of her being and her mind and to share her life.
Yet as her vibrant spirit fades, he is left only with the body -- the superficial mask of her former self.
Throughout the film, Iris not only speaks, but feels. In the awkwardness of a university apartment she leads John to bed for the first time. She takes him swimming, fills his stomach with bread and his face with kisses -- she gives him more than thoughts and words by giving him her whole self.
Just as there are no words that accurately describe emotions, there are no thoughts or touches that can solely describe being. John realizes this despite his anguish and terror of losing Iris and his sanity.
"There is only one freedom," says Iris, "the freedom of the mind." In the end we feel that her mind is finally free and that perhaps the body and touch are not so superficial after all, if the intellect is just as fragile as our aging bones. It is the combination of thought and physical pleasure that connects two people or links one person to the world.
Without the concrete, nothing would support the abstract and our minds would drift away like feathers instead of anchoring ourselves down like smoothed rocks.
