The Iron Lady

Well, she's done it again. Within the first five minutes of Iron Lady I forgot that Meryl Streep was even in this film. It's a cliche to say it, but she's unrecognisable in her much-lauded role as Margaret Thatcher, she disappears into it completely and plays Britain's most divisive Prime Minister across the course of three decades without breaking so much as an actorly sweat. But I have to say that this is where my praise for this film ends. Iron Lady is nothing more than this performance. The whole film is just structured around Streep's powerhouse ability to be Maggie Thatcher. Everything else about it is a disappointment.

I mean, this is the plot of the bloody thing - elderly Maggie Thatcher wanders around her house as she succumbs to dementia, and then she works up the courage to throw out her deceased husband's shoes. That's it. That's the plot and the climax of the whole movie. She watches a few old videos of herself and we flashback to a few key moments of her life, but overall it's a wash out. Streep is brilliant and very watchable, but the film is rubbish. When are biopic writers going to give up on using these elaborate framing devices? This is a woman with a very big story, and instead we get this very abbreviated collection of 'greatest hits'. There's just too much to say in too short an amount of time, and too much time is spent on her as an old biddy having conversations with herself!

Iron Lady takes great pains to show us Thatcher in both her old age and her youth in order to set her up as figure of sympathy. According to the film, she's both a forgotten relic and a young girl unable to assimilate into the boys' club, a figure forever laughed at by the establishment and derided by layabouts who insist on being unemployed. The poor thing! There's something very wrong with a film that suggests that the worst thing Thatcher did was neglect her kids a bit. It's very one-sided and whoever made this seems to have made it for the wrong reasons. They try to pass a bit of comment on the contrast between her feminity and her fierce leadership (there's a great scene where she asks "Shall I be mother?" after vehemently defending her decision to battle Argentina) but it's all a bit tokenistic and glorified. And if it doesn't sit well with me (a 30 year old Australian), then I can't imagine how poorly it must sit with the average middle-aged Briton!

The whole film felt very piecemeal and abbreviated, a bit like a very short TV mini-series. The negative impact of Thatcherism is glossed over too much, and the use of contemporaneous punk music in these too-few negative sequences made it all feel a bit trite and conservatively-weighted. It could've been a great film about a truly fascinating and influential figure, but once you get past the excellent casting everything else about it feels like a real hack job.

DIRECTOR: Phyllida Lloyd

WRITER/SOURCE: Abi Morgan
KEY ACTORS: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Alexandra Roach, Harry Lloyd, Olivia Colman, Anthony Head, Richard E. Grant, Roger Allam

RELATED TEXTS
- Other films and TV movies about Thatcher... The Falklands Play (starring Patricia Hodge), Thatcher: The Final Days (starring Sylvia Sims), The Long Walk to Finchley (starring Andrea Riseborough) and Margaret (starring Lindsay Duncan).
- Some other recent movies about Western heads of state: Nixon, W. and Frost/Nixon.
- Meryl Streep has also played real-life figures in Evil Angels, Julie and Julia, Silkwood and Out of Africa.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Makeup.
AFIs - won Best International Actress (Streep).
BAFTAs - won Best Actress (Streep) and Best Makeup and Hair. Nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Jim Broadbent).
Golden Globes - won Best Actress - Drama (Streep).