The focus isn’t even on her. We’re in a grungy British superette (as we used to call them in the Midwest) and some raucous music is playing loudly as an elderly woman shops for milk.
It’s only because the camera turns its attention in her direction that we really notice her: an almost dowdy, harmless-looking little old lady, a look on her face that’s halfway between befuddlement and mischief. She does a double-take when she looks at the price of the milk – and another one when a rude gentleman steps in front of her to pay for his purchase first. Then she shuffles off down a plain British side-street, seemingly another pensioner heading home from a shopping trip.
In fact, she’s a fugitive from her own home, a retiree shading into dementia whose minders are under strict orders not to let her go out alone. And she was, not too many years earlier, the most powerful woman in the world and the prime minister of England: Margaret Thatcher.
The incomparable Meryl Streep is firmly embedded in this character in “The Iron Lady.” She perfectly captures Thatcher’s canny political determination, her short-tempered approach to incompetence and her own belief that she knows what’s best for England.
In Phyllida Lloyd’s fascinating and even-handed portrait of Thatcher, her reign is recalled by the retired Thatcher, who is slowly loosing her grip on what’s real and what’s not. As the film opens and her daughter tsk-tsks about Thatcher’s escapade at the grocery store, we see Thatcher serving up a soft-boiled egg for her husband, Dennis (Jim Broadbent) – who, it turns out, lives only in her memory, having died a year earlier.
The script, by Abi Morgan, moves back and forth in time between the elderly Thatcher, still competent enough to be taken to dinner parties, and Thatcher in her youth: daughter of a grocer who was politically active and spoke out for a conservative culture of self-dependence – lower taxes on the rich, more austerity for government programs, more help for business, the poor can take care of themselves. Indeed, she could just as easily be a Tea Party Republican today.
Lloyd lets Thatcher present her ideas, delivered during campaign speeches and appearances before Parliament. The director and writer refrain from commenting on or tilting the narrative in one direction or the other: You will see what you want to see and hear what you expect, whichever side you’re on.
This review continues on my website.
The life of Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the longest-running one, presented in a really “interesting” movie.
I think that it is well understood by everyone, that thanks to Meryl Streep, who holds the leading role, this movie just might be worth seeing. Without her, Thatcher remains a firm and conservative politician, hated by many and appreciated by few; notorious for her strictness and absoluteness in all decisions, which make her a less attractive personality and a loathed political leader.
This movie is a combination of Thatcher’s political and personal life. Thatcher in her late 80’s is suffering from dementia and is sinking into her own memories of childhood and her glory days as Britain’s Prime Minister. The whole movie is based on the typical structure of a combination of her actual life and the necessary flash backs. The screenplay strongly emphasizes the woman behind the “Iron Lady”, trying to show more of the personal life than the political one.
Meryl Streep who incarnates the “Iron Lady” is, as always, perfect, and proves to everybody once again that she is worthy of her powerful status in the world of cinema. The resemblance is so remarkable that there are moments in which the audience feel like they are a watching a high-budget documentary, and not a film. Also, the whole supporting cast was well chosen, with Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher and Susan Brown as June, Thatcher’s daughter, backing Meryl Streep effectively.
On the downside, the movie seemed somewhat less British than I expected it and far less politically orientated than I wanted it. It seemed more like an American feature, even though director, Phyllida Lloyd made her name as a British theatre director and with Mamma Mia being her latest film.
Overall, “The Iron Lady” is another movie that proves Streep’s perfect performance, a film that will make someone Google the Falklands War and remind us that being a leader, good or bad, is always a hard thing to do.
Eleni Antonaropoulou http://www.unsungfilms.com