The Iron Lady sees Britain’s only female prime minister looking back on the major events in her personal and public life before and during her time in Downing Street. Instead of the forceful, dogmatic politician, Thatcher is old, frail and suffering from dementia. She has conversations with her long-deceased husband and cannot recall the date.
Her wandering mind takes us back and forth, from her upbringing as a grocer’s daughter bound for Oxford, her struggle to get elected to parliament, her marriage to Denis and her time at Westminster as education secretary and then prime minister.
Multi-award-winning Meryl Streep has the unenviable task of portraying Thatcher over a period of nearly forty years. You can always rely on Streep to disappear into a role, and as the film opens in the present day with Thatcher in her 80s, Streep can barely be recognised under the make-up and wig. Of course, it’s always slightly easier to believe any actor in a role when they aren’t seen on TV and in magazines flogging perfume, make-up or coffee machines, but Streep is astonishing. The voice and accent never waver, nor do the mannerisms. This is no imitation though. It is a complete onscreen embodiment, and it is quite startling.
Streep is excellently supported by fellow Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent as Denis and Olivia Colman as Carol (with a rather distracting prosthetic nose). The young Margaret and Denis are played with confidence by up-and-comers Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd. The old boys’ club of Westminster is represented by an array of British actors, from Richard E Grant as a slippery Michael Heseltine to Anthony Head as a rather timid Geoffrey Howe. Their interplay with Streep is well-pitched, avoiding any theatricality.
Although Streep and Roach give us an ambitious and focussed Thatcher, The Iron Lady doesn’t really get to grips with the vagaries of her character that made her revered by some and utterly loathed by others. On being proposed to by Denis, young Margaret sets out her conditions for the marriage. She will not be tied down domestically, proclaiming she ‘cannot die washing up a tea cup.’ Admirable feminism for the 1950s, but she then goes on to interact with no women other than those who serve her domestically. She is very much in a man’s world and she doesn’t seem to want to change that.
One of the main grumbles about Iron Lady is that it doesn’t go deep enough politically. Strikes, terrorism, poll tax and the miners are dealt with through graphic archive footage. The Falklands are given more time, specifically Thatcher’s decision to sink the General Belgrano. She is shown regretting the loss of life of British servicemen but not any of her decisions. The older Thatcher is not trying to justify her actions and neither is the film. The Iron Lady isn’t exactly politically neutral but it is unwilling to take sides, which is a wise move.
The other major criticism is that it is an insensitive portrait of Thatcher as she is now. Streep brilliantly conveys the mental and physical fragility of old age and is certainly not mocking Thatcher’s present condition. Dementia is something that will touch all our lives at some point, and it seems that the detractors are uncomfortable with an honest portrayal of old age. People get old, even the great and powerful. Although it is a reasonably accurate representation of the early stages of the disease – the confusion and unusual behaviour – it isn’t exactly unflinching. Sufferers can often be fearful and aggressive. It could have been a lot worse.
That goes for the film as a whole. I didn’t have great expectations for The Iron Lady, as Phyllida Lloyd’s other feature as director was the enormously silly Mamma Mia! But just as last week’s political biopic The Lady proved Luc Besson could do subtlety, The Iron Lady shows that Lloyd has refined her skills. It isn’t particularly dynamically shot, but nor does it feature Streep singing on a yacht, or shimmying up and down a ladder, or rolling around on a rooftop. And those are far more humiliating scenarios than getting old.
The Iron Lady Official UK Trailer
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Posted on January 9, 2012
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