IRIS
by Les Phillips

The great writer and scholar Iris Murdoch, addled and disoriented by advanced Alzheimer's Disease, ambles out of her Oxford house and into the city. The camera shows her wandering into roads, through the hustle and noise of industrial workaday Oxford - trucks, roundabouts, factories and plants in the background, shot as a white-gray fog. Her husband, John Bayley, is seen roaming the neighborhood in his car, frantically searching for her. Hours later an old friend has found her, brings her home. Bayley cradles her in his arms and asks softly, "Did you want to leave me?" And suddenly I realized that my face was cleansed with tears. I've cried twice in all my years seeing movies, thousands of movies. This is the third time. Some might observe that this says more about me than about the film, and that's certainly true, but I think Iris is more than the sum of its parts.

Murdoch is played by Kate Winslet (young) and Judi Dench (old); Bayley, by Hugh Bonneville (young) and Jim Broadbent (old). The screenplay, by Richard Eyre, who also directed, and Charles Wood, cuts between the times constantly. The effect is not flashback or flash-forward; it's composite, or pointillist, and it's very effective here. In fact there really isn't much narrative in Iris. I think the film assumes some knowledge of the subjects and their lives, assumes that we know how it ends, and concentrates on transmitting a sense of what Murdoch was like, what that type of British scholars' existence is like, what the Alzheimer's did to Bayley and Murdoch. And, at that, it succeeds brilliantly.

The actors are wonderful - the kind of performances that seem lightly effortless. At least partly this is due to the fact that Dench and Broadbent look so much like Murdoch and Bayley, and partly because Dench has much the same kind of authority that Murdoch must have had (and Broadbent has Bayley's kindliness and awkwardness). So they're perfectly cast, but performances that so thoroughly become the subjects are formidable, never easy, really.

Movies about creative people usually try to let you know just exactly how brilliant the artist is, and they almost always fail at that. Eyre doesn't really try to do that very much - again, he assumes you know how important and talented Murdoch was, and that's probably the best way to approach the problem in this case. Bayley comes off as a bit too much of a doormat, but that may have been inevitable. The music gets a little John Williamsy in places.

I had feared an Alzheimer's TV-movie for college professors. Not a bit of it. Nothing overplayed. The disease neither better nor worse than it is. The Times didn't like this film too much, and made some crack about it simply being the annual ploy for a Judi Dench Oscar nomination. Dame Iris may not be Dame Judi's most challenging role, but she's a great actress, even if she was in Chocolat. She probably doesn't care about awards very much, but she won't ever get more of them than she deserves. Go see Iris.

In brief:

I found the first half to two thirds of The Business of Strangers to be nearly perfect. It's a kind of psychodrama, a satire on the business world, with Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles, and Frederick Weller holed up in an airport and a hotel, the females jawing away and plotting to wreak vicious revenge on the male. Writer-director Patrick Stettner uses the airport (Newark, I think) and the nearby hotel to tremendous effect - glass and steel right angles and boxes, ultracontemporary and cold. You can see light and sun through the big glass buildings, but you know exactly how contained you are. The characters move through a series of boxes like this. Very few exterior shots, and those manage to imply a kind of claustrophobia as well. Brilliant.

Channing and Stiles are just exceptional. Channing's character is fully realized; you get the whole range of pride, desperation, toughness, horror, fatigue. At times she looks like the vigorous younger self she wants to project in business; at times she looks ten years older than she is, looks like she wants to die right there. Stiles is bratty and diabolical, but still, you know she's scared.

Then the plot thickens, or curdles. Stettner wants something Shocking to happen, and it does, but he never quite works out the precise motivations and character elements that would cause it to happen. If the rest of the film weren't so precise, so absolutely right, the denouement might not clunk the way it does. And though Weller is a capable actor, I don't think Stettner figured out exactly who the character was or what he really wanted him to do. There's a fine line between ambiguity in character motivation and simply faking it, hoping to get away with it. Either I haven't figured out what these characters are really doing, or what Stettner thinks they're really doing - or he doesn't know either, but is hoping to get by.

All this sounds rather cryptic - so, go see the film. For all its flaws, it's quite extraordinary.

Zoolander is no good at all. The actors who are playing broad stereotypes (e.g., Jerry Stiller, Milla Jovovich as a bitch-dominatrix, Will Ferrell as a sort of Dr. Evil) don't do anything fresh or interesting enough to justify themselves. The actual Derek Zoolander character (utterly moronic male supermodel) was originally a bit of TV sketch comedy, and should have stayed that way - seven minutes of it might be funny.

Ben Stiller, as Derek, has three or four creative riffs, but this is not an inspired creation in the way that some SNL personae can be. Ben isn't good looking enough to really be a male model, but he's not ugly enough for the notion to be a total joke, so his looks are another awkward piece of the problem. Apparently release of this film was delayed (with scenes altered) because of the quasi-terrorist plot. The plot is too silly to offend anyone, or interest anyone.

©2001 Les Phillips
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