Iris. (Film review: flowering Iris).

Iris * Directed by Richard Eyre * Written by Eyre and Charles Wood * Starring Hugh Bonneville, Jim Broadbent, Judi Dench, and Kate Winslet * Miramax

As an urban stoic who is able to keep tears at bay for anything, from the chopping of a very large onion to the election of a very small president, I was stunned at the power of John Bayley's Elegy for Iris (excerpted in a 1998 New Yorker issue) to make me weep. Charting the mental unraveling of wife Iris Murdoch from Alzheimer's disease, it radiated with the writer's adoration of his subject, attaining a state of grace and a perfection of prose that can't be faked.

Something akin to that glow can be read in Jim Broadbent's face in an early scene from Iris, when, as a graying Bayley, he beams with wonder at Murdoch as she delivers a lecture on the importance of education. It doesn't hurt that Murdoch is being played by Judi Dench, who achieves that magical balance of beatitude and pragmatism we have come to expect from her. But even without Dench, even without knowing a thing about Bayley or his history with Murdoch, you can infer from Broadbent's pixilated stare thai something very profound has gone down between these two people.

You don't have to have read a word of Iris Murdoch or John Bayley to be affected by Richard Eyre's film version of Elegy for Iris, a Shadowlands-like hybrid of love and ill health among the literati. There is nothing particularly innovative in the film's structure which efficiently weaves scenes of Murdoch's degeneration from Alzheimer's with resonant echoes from the couple's early years together. Rather, we thrill to the juxtaposition of four amazing actors trading turns as the literary lovers in their prime and autumnal years.

Oh, to have one's life realized on-screen by Judi Dench and Kate Winslet--Norman Mailer should be so lucky. Dench's quiet fire is matched spark for spark by Winslet as the young Murdoch, a vivacious, spontaneous, frighteningly self-assured intellectual as promiscuous in her early love life as she was with words. Unfortunately, his fudges the extent of its subject's bisexuality much in the way Carrington did Dora Carrington's queer sexuality. When a young Bayley asks Murdoch if she goes to bed with women, Winslet takes a long, pregnant toke on her cigarette and throws him one of those Bette Davis burns that speaks volumes. And yet when she finally fesses up to her complete erotic history, she rattles off an exclusively male list of lovers.

The film's real heart lies in the vibrant bond that existed between Bayley and Murdoch from their university days to her death and in the pain of seeing a vital loved one wither away from disease. All of 90 minutes long, Iris manages to chronicle Murdoch's mental deterioration with economy and a startling degree of humor: A medic, testing her alertness, asks Dench to name the prime minister; she replies, embarrassed, "Does it matter? Someone will know." But as good as Dench is, her scenes only achieve their full potency in contrast with those of the ebullient Winslet, frolicking nude in a river or tumbling down the stairs at a party in a raucous fit of laughter.

The citrusy yin of Dench and Winslet finds a beguilingly sweet yang in the stuttering John Bayley of Broadbent and Hugh Bonneville as his young-pup counterpart. Broadbent and Bonneville find so much charisma in the character of the befuddled academic that they leave us wanting to know who this guy was, anyway. Last year they called it Pollock, but it was really Lee Krasner's movie. This year it's Iris, and Mr. Iris walks off with the show.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.