Grade: B+

Verdict: Sometimes slow going, but the acting will take your breath away.

Details: Starring Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent and Kate Winslet. Directed by Richard Eyre. Rated R for nudity and sexuality. One hour and thirty one minutes.

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Review: Once upon a time, novelist Iris Murdoch had a beautiful mind. Regarded as one of Britain's finest 20th-century writers, she authored 26 books, including "A Severed Head" and "The Sea, The Sea," which won the Booker Prize in 1978. But her vibrant, probing mind shut down, bit by bit, when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1997.

"Iris" focuses on a number of things. Love and loss. Deterioration and devotion. But most of all, it's an exemplary lesson in Acting 101, taught by Judi Dench (Iris) and Jim Broadbent (John Bayley, her loyal husband of 40 years); the pair's work was recognized with Oscar nominations this week, hers for best actress, his for best supporting actor.

Murdoch died in 1999; the movie slides back and forth between the couple's horrific and melancholy final years and four decades earlier when they first met at Oxford. Kate Winslet (who earned a best supporting actress nomination herself) plays the fiercely free-spirited and self-confident younger Iris; Hugh Bonneville is the stammering, uncertain younger John.

Rather than examine the years in-between, director Richard Eyre uses the extremes of their life together to contrast the anything-can-happen vitality of youth and the brutal betrayals of old age.

In the '50s, Iris is a lively, direct young scholar whose hunger for experience includes numerous affairs, both male and female. John, however, is meek and sexually repressed; he's enthralled by Iris and absolutely stunned that she could fall for the likes of him. Asked at a party if he's with Iris, his reply is a slightly panicky, "I hope so."

Winslett and Bonneville provide expert correlatives to the older actors - you can really see them becomiing Dench and Broadbent years later - and they have the responsibility for laying out the blueprint ofthe relationship. However, the movie's emotonal core lies in Iris' heartbreaking and deeply frightened desent into ... what? Dementia? Emptiness? Nothiness? Confronted with the inevitabilty of losing her mind , she wonders what it will be like: "How would we know? Those of us who live in our minds?"

"Iris" understands the slow death of Alzheimers. First, there's just a mind blip during a TV interview. Then she repeats herself at a lecture. Finally she's at the doctor; not knowing the name of the prime minister doesn't faze her in the least. "It doesn't matter," she shrugs, "Someone will know." It would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.

The skip betyween past and present works better intellectually than emotionally. Too often, we're caught up in something - Winslett making her reputation at Oxford or Dench sitting befuddled on a beach, girlishly happy one moment, childishly petulant the next - the film scuttles back to the other story. It's easy to feel short-changed at both ends.

What we do get are moments so exquisitely acted that you think Dench and Broadbent must've lived together in another life. Dench gets the timing of a brain illness - the vagueness, the agitation and anger, the moments of total clarity, the bewildered semi-awareness that her condition is worsening. Dench shows us a mind turning into a blank as fear is washed away by forgetfulness.

Broadbent, the British character actor who played W.S. Gilbert in "Topsy- Turvy" and Renée Zellweger's dad in "Bridget Jones's Diary," shows us a totally different kind of fear. He shuffles forlornly through the alarming disarray that has become their home - hallways littered with books, newspapers, and empty food cans. As we saw so clearly in the Oxford section, he's totally lost without Iris. His only "safe" emotion is a bitterness that fitfully shields him from utter despair. On a beach vacation with a friend, their hostess asks how she should treat Iris. He coldly replies, "It doesn't matter what you say or how you say it. Nothing gets through."

"Iris" is a film about a love punched in the face by fate.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution