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.