Really Surprised!

Good start, but then it gets ruined

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Without reflecting any of the writers literary output and contemplation, this film roams aimlessly into sentimentalism of an aging couple, which, the viewer doesn't have particular reasons to relate to or care for. Iris Murdoch is striped off her artistic existence, and is treated as any ordinary human being struggling with dementia. So, why make it a movie about her, than any other person in the world, if we're not going to fully understand why it was such a tragic loss for her particularly? Too much ordinary human story, too little information, and an obnoxious performance by the otherwise lovable Kate Winslet.

Well, as of my submission there will be 136 reviews of this movie. Which just goes to show that in our time of semi-education, where millions have gone to college to little effect except to have the concept of celebrity imposed on supposed intellectuals; it is preferable to the masses to watch a movie about Iris Murdoch rather than read or--what is more likely--dabble in her while sipping lattes at the Barnes and Noble. That is to say, I understand why this depressing and incoherent movie has gotten so much attention! But I couldn't finish it! (And I like Judi Dench.) John Bayley was portrayed as a male bimbo--a scholarly and compliant cuckold, so silly in his puppy dog willingness to accept her infidelities, that one wonders how he could have become a don. (Were they all so weak and ineffectual at that time?) What Iron-maiden Murdoch saw in him is beyond me; yet, on second thought, he is probably the sort of, what we would call, metro-sexual figure that might fit in quite well with her self-consciously styled alpha-female personality. Somewhat pedestrian for the learned and profound Iris, if you ask me.In that vein I think that all of Iris' years were years of decline. She just had to be sexually promiscuous and something of an exhibitionist. Ditto the communism. And the Sartre too! And her assaults on bourgeois traditions and morality. All the trendy intellectual thumb twiddling of the post-war era. In any period, I just do not like people of her genre. if she had been born 25 years earlier she would have been a Vita Sackville-West or, worse, a Virginia Woolf. The traction these writers have retained is almost wholly due to modern feminism. Ditto Murdoch. That the reader may gauge my reference point, I find Dorothy Sayers to be incomparably better as well as more friendly and reassuring. Sayers learned from her mistakes and was comfortable with her sex. Murdoch was a woman who was not happy with her lot--being a woman, that is.So to endure to the end a movie whose end was an ending from the very beginning and to focus on the dregs of the end of the end as does this movie; the bitter, slobbering attempts of a miserable creature--unaware of herself in so many ways and unable to retain enough memory to put together the lessons she should have learned--to hold together her human identity; all the while clawing and resisting the booby of a man who shared her bed for over 40 year--well, I could see the finale.

Iris is a very moving film, in which Judi Dench and James Broadbent portray the ageing characters of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, still much in love, as together they deal with Iris's Alzeimer's disease. The film is based on John Bayley's book of the real-life struggle which he and his famous literary wife endured. This stage of life is neither sad nor pathetic, but two people facing together life's sometimes cruel fate.We see through a series of flashbacks how they met and forged a lifelong relationship. The younger Iris and John are performed by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville, as a fun-loving couple cycling through the countryside and going for swims off the nearest riverbank. Iris was a worldly woman involved with multiple male partners and John, a late-bloomer with a stutter, who doted on the gorgeous young Iris. Eventually, Iris settled into her role as a national literary figure, giving interviews and speeches in which beautifully crafted sentences rolled off her tongue. Then, rather suddenly, she was stricken with Alzeimer's disease.I was reminded of my own grandparents' fight with Alzeimer's as I watched Judi Dench in Iris Murdoch's character. Like my grandmother, Iris lost contact with reality and life ceased to make sense to her; yet, there were moments when she let us know that she still treasured those who cared for her. Physically strong and able to go for long walks, Iris had stamina that far surpassed her capacity to understand. These are the cruel ironies of Alzeimer's disease. As John Bayley, James Broadbent was the loving and faithful husband, who gave his all until he reached his own breaking point and agreed to put her in a home.Other actors who appear are Samuel West and Timothy West (in a brief cameo) as Iris's friend and John's rival Maurice in youth and old age; Juliet Aubrey and Penelope Wilton, as her friend Janet.John Bayley's book about Iris's illness has produced a fine film with great acting and an honest treatment of a real-life situation.

Jim Broadbent won a well deserved Oscar for his work in this film, leaving Kate Winslet and Dame Judi Dench as also-rans for once. Iris Murdoch was a fantastic writer, but the film is not about her, it's about her husband's loss of her to Alzheimer's. The flaw is that it keeps on focusing on her without showing us who she is. Because her talent was in her books and her mind, we are told what he's lost, we only get a sort of superficial Iris. We see literally, from the young John Bayley's perspective where their relationship sprung from, but learn little about why her work meant anything or even if it did really mean anything to him. We know she was was fantastic with words, but they're not in the script because while Winslet and Dench do a great job, the script is John's story. The fact that John Bayley was married to one of the greatest writers of the 20th century should not have distracted the directors attention from the fact that this story was never about her.