#90 Iris

The power of Judi Dench's accusatory stare - Ms. Dench could bring Anne Robinson of ''Weakest Link'' to her knees and still have enough energy to take on John Ashcroft - makes her the heir to Glenda Jackson's icy glare. Understanding the drama inherent in portraying the loss of that power, the director Sir Richard Eyre captures Ms. Dench's chilblain gaze slowly diminishing in the moldy, minor-key melodrama ''Iris.'' She stars as the literary force Iris Murdoch, as her appetite for language and pleasure collapses under Alzheimer's disease.

In lectures Iris clips off syllables as if she were snapping peas, and Ms. Dench's precision suggests the mountainous joy that the writer derives from shaping and refining her sensibility. The writing is at its strongest in her fussy wrestling with her husband, the critic John Bayley (Jim Broadbent), who plays a dotty and much softer foil to Iris. The script by Sir Richard and Charles Wood is attentive and fine in observing the behavior of this long-married pair. The movie missteps when it tries to broaden the material; the director falls short of the task.

''Iris,'' which opens today at Lincoln Square, begins with the elderly Murdoch, who died in 1999, swimming underwater in a murky pond, where people from her life are drifting around, visible through the silt. Iris sees the younger, proudly naked version of herself (played by Kate Winslet) coursing through the waters. It's Sir Richard's way of playing out the loss of acuity in Iris's mind: the dense fluid of her mind, where nothing remains clear. And the movie shifts back and forth in time from the youthful and intensely eager Iris being courted by the shy, pudgy John (Hugh Bonneville) to the present, tracking Iris's descent from a television interview where she loses the thread of a statement she is making.

Amusingly, the young Iris is like a figure out of D. H. Lawrence with her snapping condescension toward conventional morality; one wonders what she would have thought of this movie, which seems to have been made by the kind of middle-brow she would have walked right past. It would probably be asking too much to get some sense of her writing into the picture, which uses John's struggles to care for his wife as its emotional foundation.

Unfortunately, the film lacks balance between past and present; one of the few differences between the two is that the characters are wearing different clothes. (Well, sort of: the two Johns have a bent for the same tweeds and flannels.) Sir Richard tries to set the film up as a puzzle, but the device he uses requires some of the vigor that Ms. Dench's Iris with her merciless superiority possesses. He's not up to it, and the film sags under the missed opportunities and the obviousness.

The movie's comfort zone is in the incidents of Iris and John's affectionate sparring and puttering around the house. ''Iris'' becomes drab and slowed in outlining the particular contrasts of the young Iris and the young John; he's a timid, stuttering bear cub led into the garden of earthly delights and jealous of her commanding worldliness. Mr. Wood once worked with a director whose nimbleness would have been more suited to marrying fizziness and despair: Richard Lester, with whom Mr. Wood collaborated on ''The Knack'' and ''Cuba.''

Rarely does a movie feel as leaden-footed as ''Iris,'' especially when it tries to bounce back and forth. The audience is transported between two very obvious stories and becomes slightly irritated by the grinding inevitability of both of them. As a result, Iris Murdoch gets lost in the shuffle.

''Iris'' seems to be this year's effort to put Ms. Dench into Academy Award consideration, an event that's as much a part of December popular culture as Dick Clark's ''New Year's Rockin' Eve'' - and as pro forma and unvaried.

Ms. Dench and Mr. Broadbent have a jabbing, likable rhythm; his effortless submersion into character is an enjoyable contrast to her willfulness, and her relationship with him makes her seem human. So when he gets to unleash the hurt and resentfulness that come from all of the years together and she is so damaged by Alzheimer's that she cannot respond, ''Iris'' can't help being moving.

The power of his outburst comes from the work that the director has done in setting up their puttering domesticity, and that is where the movie needs to dwell: in the wreck that Alzheimer's can make of a happy home...