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Meryl Streep impersonates the Iron Lady to excellent effect in this otherwise bland and forgettable, compromised mess of a picture |
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Cast: Meryl Streep (Margaret Thatcher), Jim Broadbent (Denis
Thatcher), Olivia Colman (Carol Thatcher), Roger Allam (Gordon Reece), Nicholas
Farrell (Airey Neave), Iain Glen (Alfred Roberts), Richard E. Grant (Michael
Heseltine), Anthony Head (Sir Geoffrey Howe), Harry Lloyd (Young Denis
Thatcher), Michael Pennington (Michael Foot), Alexandra Roach (Young Margaret
Thatcher), John Sessions (Edward Heath)
In British politics has there been a figure as controversial
as Margaret Thatcher? A domineering Prime Minister who reshaped the country
(for better or worse depending on who you speak to), crafting a legacy in the
UK’s politics, economy and society that we will continue to feel for the
foreseeable future, she’s possibly one of the most important figures in our
history. It’s a life rich for a proper biographical treatment; instead, it gets
this film.
The film’s framing device is focused on the ageing Thatcher
(Meryl Streep), now dealing with onset dementia and having detailed
conversations with her deceased husband Denis (Jim Broadbent). Cared for by her
daughter Carol (Olivia Colman), she reflects on her political career and the
sacrifices she made personally to achieve these. Woven in and out of this are
Thatcher’s increasingly disjointed memories of her political career.
The most surprising thing about this film is how little it
actually wants to engage with Thatcherism itself. Perhaps aware that (certainly
in the UK) Thatcher remains an incredibly divisive figure, the film’s focus is
actually her own struggles with grief and approaching dementia. Her career as PM
is relegated to a series of flashbacks and short scenes, which fill probably
little more than 20-30 minutes of the runtime, shot and spliced together as a
mixture of deliberately subjective memories and fevered half-dreams. Can you
imagine a film about Thatcher where Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike
doesn’t merit a mention? You don’t need to: thanks to The Iron Lady it now exists.
Perhaps Thatcher’s politics were considered to “unlikeable”
– certainly, one imagines, by its writer and director – to be something to
craft a film around, so it was thought better to brush them gently under the
table. Instead the focus is to make Thatcher as sympathetic as possible to a
viewer who didn’t share her politics, by concentrating on her struggles against
sexism in the 1950s and her struggles with age late on. Why not accept what
Thatcher stood for and make a film (for better or worse) about that? Perhaps
more material on her actual achievements in office were shot and cut (the film
does have a very short run time and underuses its ace supporting cast), but the
while film feels fatally compromised picture – which is more than a little
ironic since it is about a woman famous for her lack of compromise.
In fact it’s rather hard to escape the view that Roger Ebert
put forward: “few people were neutral in their feelings about [Thatcher],
except the makers of this picture”. It’s a film with no real interest in either
politics or history, the two things that defined Thatcher’s entire life. And as
if to flag up the mediocre nature of the material they’ve chosen, it’s then interspersed
with too-brief cuts to more interesting episodes from Thatcher’s life than those
we are watching. Only when the older Thatcher hosts a dinner party and launches
into a blistering sudden condemnation of Al-Qaeda and support of military
action against terrorism (followed by her casual disregard of a
hero-worshipping acolyte) do we ever get a sense of finding out something about
her, or of seeing her personality brought to life.
The film’s saving grace is of course Meryl Streep’s terrific
impersonation of Thatcher. I call it impersonation as the film so strenuously avoids
delving into the events and opinions that shaped Thatcher that Streep gets very
little opportunity to really develop a character that we can understand, or to present
an insight into Thatcher. Her performance as the older Thatcher – losing
control of her mannerisms, deteriorating over the course of the film – is
impressive in its technical accomplishment, but that’s largely what it remains.
As the film doesn’t allow us to really know Thatcher, and doesn’t work with
what defines her, it largely fails to move us when we see her weak and alone.
So for all the accomplishment of Streep’s work, I couldn’t say this was a truly
great performance – certainly of no comparison to, say, Day-Lewis as Lincoln or
Robert Hardy as Churchill. I’d even say Andrea Riseborough’s performance in
TV’s The Long Walk to Finchley told
us more about the sort of person Thatcher was than Streep does here.
Despite most of the rest of the cast being under-used
though, there are some good performances. Jim Broadbent is very good as Denis
Thatcher, although again his performance is partly a ghostly collection of
mannerisms and excellent complementary acting. However the chemistry between Streep and him is magnificent and accounts for many of the film's finest moments. Olivia Colman does sterling work
under a bizarre fake nose as a no-nonsense Carol Thatcher. From the all-star
cast of British actors, Roger Allam stands out as image-consultant Gordon Reece
and Nicholas Farrell is superbly calm, cool and authoritative as Airey Neave.
Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd are excellent impersonating younger Thatchers.
The Iron Lady
could have been a marvellous, in-depth study of the politics of the 1980s, and
a brilliant deconstruction and discussion of an era that still shapes our views
of Britain today. However, it wavers instead into turning a woman defined by
her public role and views into a domestic character, and brings no insight to
the telling of it. By running scared of Thatcher’s politics altogether, it
creates a film which makes it hard to tell why we should be making a fuss about
her at all – making it neither interesting to those who know who Thatcher is, nor
likely to spark interest in those who have never heard of her.
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