Taglines: Some people need love spelled out for them.
Stanley and Iris movie storyline. Iris King (Jane Fonda), a widow still grieving a half-year after the loss of her husband, works in a baking factory in Connecticut and lives in a high-crime area. She lives from paycheck to paycheck as she raises her two children, Kelly and Richard. Also staying with her are her sister Sharon and Sharon’s abusive husband Joe, both unemployed. With money already tight for the family, Kelly discovers she is pregnant, which makes matters worse.
Iris makes the acquaintance of Stanley Cox (De Niro), a cook in the bakery’s lunchroom cafeteria, when he comes to her aid after her purse is snatched on a bus. But as their friendship develops, she begins noticing peculiarities about Stanley − he doesn’t own a car (he instead bicycles wherever he needs to go), he lives with and supports his elderly father, becomes frustrated when asked to sign his name, doesn’t believe in opening Chinese fortune cookies, and cannot pick out a specific item from a shelf.
Iris soon realizes that Stanley is illiterate, and when she innocently mentions this to Stanley’s boss, Stanley is fired the next day over food safety (and potential lawsuit) concerns, despite being a good cook and model employee. Afterwards, Stanley is unable to obtain any steady work, forcing him to move into a garage and put his father in a shabby retirement home. His father dies in the home only a few weeks later, upsetting Stanley over the fact that his illiteracy prevented him from caring for his father properly.
Stanley seeks Iris out and asks her to teach him to read, explaining that his traveling-salesman father moved him all over the country when Stanley was a boy, bouncing him to nearly 50 different schools in total, resulting in Stanley developing no reading or writing skills from this lack of educational stability. Iris begins giving Stanley basic reading lessons and he gradually grows close to her and her family. It is during one of these reading exercises that he tells her that he’s been wanting to get intimate with her since they first met, but Iris is hesitant.
Iris tests Stanley’s developing reading skills by making him a map and having him meet her at a certain street corner within 15 minutes, but Stanley gets hopelessly lost. Hours later, he reaches the corner where a frantic Iris is still waiting. Frustrated, Stanley marches off alone without saying a word, his interest in learning to read gone. Iris visits him at his garage home to try to persuade him to continue learning to read.
Looking around, she sees a large mechanical project that Stanley is working on, as he invents things as a hobby. He has designed a cake-cooling machine that can outperform anything in the commercial marketplace. Iris is immensely impressed and Stanley reveals that a local company has shown interest in his invention and even offered him a job. Stanley agrees to start reading again with Iris, and in time learns to write short sentences. Stanley surprises Iris by cooking a big dinner for her and her family, and the two of them begin to grow close again.
Stanley & Iris is a 1990 American romantic drama film directed by Martin Ritt and starring Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro. The screenplay by Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch is loosely based on the novel Union Street by Pat Barker.
The original music score is composed by John Williams and the cinematography is by Donald McAlpine. The film was marketed with the tagline “Some people need love spelled out for them.” It was the final film that Ritt directed, and he died months after the film’s release.
Stanley and Iris (1990)
Directed by: Martin Ritt
Starring: Jane Fonda, Robert De Niro, Swoosie Kurtz, Martha Plimpton, Harley Cross, Jamey Sheridan, Zohra Lampert, Loretta Devine, Karen Ludwig, Kathy Kinney
Screenplay by: Harriet Frank, Jr., Irving Ravetch
Production Design by: Joel Schiller
Cinematography by: Donald McAlpine
Film Editing by: Sidney Levin
Costume Design by: Theoni V. Aldredge
Set Decoration by: Leslie Bloom, Steve Shewchuk
Art Direction by: Alicia Keywan, Eric Orbom
Music by: John Williams
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release Date: February 9, 1990
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