Meryl Streep’s performance as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady has received near universal praise. The movie itself has gotten decidedly mediocre reviews from critics and consumers. I have to agree on both counts. If you’re a Streep fan, you’ll want to see this. If you are looking for insight or information about Mrs. Thatcher’s career, politics, philosophy, personality or motivation you will be disappointed. If you seek an interesting take on her impact on British society, economics or international standing you won’t find it here. If you’d be satisfied with a good, solid story about an interesting person, The Iron Lady isn’t that, either, although it has its moments.
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990, the first woman to hold that post, and the longest serving PM of the 20th century. She was a hard line conservative, very pro-business and lead the movement to dismantle the UK’s ‘socialist’ policies, privatize government-owned industries, cut welfare spending, etc. She also presided over Britain’s victory in the short, and highly popular, Falklands War with Argentina. Most Americans, myself included, know little about her – other than the fact that she was sort of England’s Ronald Reagan, more strident perhaps, and not so warm and fuzzy.
In Britain, however, Thatcher was and remains a highly controversial and divisive figure, and it seems nearly everyone has a strong opinion about her and “Thatcherism.” As a result, The Iron Lady film has done boffo business there, with Tories critical of it’s portrayal of their sainted heroine, and liberals unhappy about the movie’s relatively uncritical approach to her politics. For us Yanks, however, the picture provides little context – historical, philosophical, political – for Thatcher’s reign or the period leading up to it. It is so uninformative that it’s hard to get excited about the ‘drama’ of her political battles one way or the other.
Meryl Streep’s role as Mrs. Thatcher takes two forms: the old lady and the iron lady. The story unfolds as a reminiscence of sorts by an elderly Thatcher many years after her fall from power. As the old lady, Streep gives a nuanced, touching portrayal of a once powerful woman, now widowed, drifting with her memories, not altogether in the here and now, communing with the ghost of her beloved husband, Denis (JimBroadbent), and straining to maintain her dignity despite a faltering body and mind. This incarnation of Thatcher is undoubtedly fictional, and, freed from the limits of biographical accuracy, Streep, director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Abi Morgan, do a lovely job imagining what it might be like to go from great power and responsibility to almost total powerlessness and dependency. The makeup department also deserves applause for, incredibly and believably, making Streep (62) look about eighty.
In real life, Mrs. Thatcher is reportedly well along the slippery slope of Alzheimers, and Tory critics of The Iron Lady have expressed outrage that the filmmakers would “stoop so low” as to depict her in this condition. The U.S. equivalent would be a film about Reagan showing him in his final, semi-sentient years; one can imagine the Republican uproar. However, I have to say that the depiction of the elder Thatcher does not seem at all mocking or predatory to me. On the contrary, it is quite sympathetic.
The retrospective meandering of old Mrs. Thatcher primarily covers two time periods: The first is her early adulthood as young Margaret Roberts (Alexandra Roach), a politically engaged grocer’s daughter, who meets her future husband and then decides to run for public office to DO something to CHANGE things. Roach is fine in the role, as is Harry Lloyd as young Denis Thatcher. (Lloyd plays Viserys Targaryen in the hit series Game of thrones, but you would not recognize him as the same person here).
The second subject of reminiscence covers the period of the mature Thatcher’s ascendancy, from her decision to seek the Conservative Party’s leadership in 1975 through her tumultuous years as PM beginning in 1979 and concluding with her ouster by fellow conservatives in 1990. Frankly, this portion of the movie bites off more than it can chew. The filmmakers try to show some of the highlights of Thatcher’s administration, but, as I noted at the outset, they give us no context for the dilemmas faced and decisions taken. This is a short film at 105 minutes, and only about half the running time is used to glimpse the iron lady in her prime, not enough by any measure. The result is a hodgepodge of “events”, stagy little set pieces without a through-story and without any real drama. Oh, we see angry crowds, political demonstrations, and the like, but so what? What’s going on? We don’t know. Streep looks pretty good as the iron lady in her prime. But it is more an impersonation than a portrayal. If you’ve seen the trailer for this flick, you’ve seen most of this stuff already.
The failure is not Streep’s; it’s in the conception. This is film written by a woman, directed by a woman, about the most powerful British woman since Elizabeth I. I suspect that the point of the film is to show the fortitude and travails faced by this remarkable woman as she broke through gender walls into the male power bastion. In this it is modestly successful, mildly amusing, and not the least bit surprising. It is all well and good to want to want to make a point, and this particular point is certainly worth making, but in order for the moral of the story to resonate, the audience needs to be drawn into and caught up in that story, to care about the heroine. We do care about old, fading Lady Thatcher and are touched by her situation; but as to the tough as nails battle-ax prime minister, not so much. In the immortal words of Governor Rick Perry, “Oops!”
In wide release.
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