THE Oscar voters love illness, mental or physical. Sure enough, A Beautiful Mind (schizophrenia) and Iris (Alzheimer's), the ailment movies du jour, are nominated for gongs ago-go.

Naturally, we are delighted for York's top banana of the Millennium, Dame Judi Dench, for her by now annual nomination, and for Kate Winslet for hers, and for marvellous Jim Broadbent, who has long deserved such recognition.

Iris is a performance festival, a film to endure rather than enjoy, and far heavier going than any novel by its subject, Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher who cherished freedom, sensuality, the power of goodness and self-expression, and relished the wonder of words.

Richard Eyre, better known for his Royal National Theatre productions, directs and co-writes (with Charles Wood) this Murdoch tribute show from husband John Bayley's memoirs but, like the new Ali film, how do you encapsulate a life whose great joys are suddenly consumed by illness?

That sadness threatens to dominate the mood: the crumbling of brilliance, when not self-inflicted in the manner of Shakespeare's flawed heroes, is still more tragic but needs the words to match it, and the writers aren't on a par with Iris Murdoch herself, or Shakespeare for that matter.

Iris ends up more academic than it should, inevitably given its setting among the Oxford literati and intellectuals, the world Iris shared with doting, dotty don John Bayley, bright himself but unworldly and outshone by her in their untidy idyll.

That eccentric relationship, their shifting but mutual dependency and love, as much as Iris's sun sinking into the dusk of Alzheimer's, is at the heart of a story that zigzags between Fifties courtship beginning and late-Nineties last days, with straw-thatched Winslet and Dench sharing the Murdoch role, and the unsung Hugh Bonneville and Broadbent playing the stammering Bayley. Winslet is more showy than Dench, whose face constantly says more than the dialogue she is given, and she can teach young Kate a lesson or two in not over-playing to the camera.

Given that Bayley is more ordinary, he is easier to play, and you warm more to him in the hands of both the puppy Bonneville and devoted old labrador Broadbent.

You learn more about the minutiae of Iris Murdoch - the lesbian dabbling in student days, the naked swimming - than her writing but above all you wish to open her books to appreciate her wit and wisdom anew.

Updated: 08:58 Friday, February 15, 2002