Movie Review

Miramax, directed by Richard Eyre, starring Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet, Hugh Bonneville, 128 minutes, 2001.

This is a great love story but it will rip your liver out! It is a memoir of the relationship of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. Dench, who bears a strong physical likeness to Murdoch, plays the elder and Winslet the younger, Iris. Broadbent plays her husband John Bayley as the older man and Bonneville plays her young suitor. The story chronicles her long slow decline into dementia and Bayley's devoted care for her.

Murdoch is a brilliant, vivacious and freethinking Oxford student during the Second World War. She became a philosopher, poet and the foremost novelist of her time. Bayley on the other hand, even as a young man (6 years younger than she) is a ditsy, absent minded professor type (he became Wharton Professor of English at Oxford) who, at one point says that 'she did everything; the shopping, the accounts, the cleaning…' One of the metaphors for their relationship is a wild bicycle ride down a long hill. "Stop! Ï can't keep up with you!" he cries out. "Just keep hold of me, it will be alright!" she shouts back. And a wild ride it is. This is no Romantic or Comic Tale with a happy ending nor are the heroes beaten down by The Fates as in a Tragedy. It is an Ironic Story. No rescue in the last reel. No heroic defeat. In the end, they have each other and they journey together.

In parish life I have been touched and humbled by the devotion of couples and families as they cope with the descent into madness of a parent or spouse. Dench is letter perfect in her portrayal of the behaviours of a person with Altzheimers; repeated questioning, close following, pacing, wandering off, angry outbursts and silence. Bayley is no saint, for while utterly devoted to Murdoch, he has his own outbursts when the burden of care becomes too much and he irrationally' and resentfully remembers her ambiguous relationships with women friends and her several lovers. In one touching scene she wanders off and is returned home many hours later by a former lover who found her "between the soup and the baked beans" at the supermarket.

The cruel irony of the story is that the woman who prized words and made her way in the world with them, in the end had none. "Love's the only language everyone understands. If one doesn't have words, how does one think?" she asks John, early in their relationship. His reply proves prescient, "Language is all very well but it's not the only way of understanding one another. There's sight and smell and touch."

The price of the film is found in a very brief scene, a walk on part by the taxi driver who arrives to take Iris to the nursing home where she will die. She sits hunched on the stairs of their squalid home. Every taxi driver's nightmare. He's big, he's rough but he talks with her with such gentleness that when he asks her her name she is able to turn and smile and speak it. He is Simon of Cyrene and a model for us all in our loose talk of meeting Jesus in everyday life.