REVIEW

The Iron Lady

— With an Oscar-winning (unless I’m wrong) performance embedded in a conventional Lifetime biopic, The Iron Lady will no doubt thrill devotees of the divine and terrible Meryl Streep, who is uncannily convincing as the Conservative Party leader who became the first (and so far only) woman to serve as prime minister of the United Kingdom.

As Margaret Thatcher, Streep manages something more than mere impersonation, catching nearly subliminal attitudes of head and shoulders and replaying the familiar patterns of speech and gesture to the extent that she seems to merge with the actual Thatcher - or at least the widely broadcast version we carry around in our heads. Let’s say this and be done with it: Streep is remarkable, and her performance alone is reason enough to see this film.

Yet it’s really not much of a movie; Phyllida Lloyd (whose only previous film, the effervescently awful Mama Mia!, also starred Dame Meryl) seems content to hit the obvious notes in the expected time, furnishing her Maggie with a ghostly husband, the eight years’ dead Denis (Jim Broadbent, uncharacteristically floundering) and a peck of minor cruelties that subvert the overall admiring tone of the film.

This Thatcher is hardly the monster on whose grave Elvis Costello famously waits to trample; she seems more like the grumpy but common-sensical matriarch of a TV sitcom family.

The most groan-inducing of these little digs is a time bomblet smuggled in near the beginning of the film when the young Margaret Roberts (played with an alert charm by Alexandra Roach) tells her future husband (Harry Lloyd plays the young Denis) that she does not intend to be “one of those women,” and that she will “not die washing up a teacup.” So what must she be doing as the curtain falls? Groan.

That’s not to suggest there’s not something heartbreaking in seeing Streep as Thatcher doddering alone and anonymous (a “Napoleon in rags,” perchance?) through a grocery store after having slipped away from her handlers. She finds the milk overpriced, which might resonate with those who remember how she was nicknamed “Thatcher Milk Snatcher” in 1971 when, as British Education secretary, she sought to end a program that provided free milk to schoolchildren.

Lloyd’s film is arranged as a series of flashbacks from the near present, in which the aged Thatcher (she’s now 86) is being visited by her crisply efficient daughter Carol (Olivia Colman), who has come in part to help her mother dispose of her dead father’s clothes. Then there’s a flashback - triggered by the Freudian slip of Thatcher signing a copy of her memoirs with her maiden name - back to her teenage years in Grantham, as the daughter of a provincial middle-class grocer (Iain Glen).

Another flashback - triggered by a suffocating dinner party that reminds her of a similar 1950 meeting with patronizing Conservative functionaries - takes her back to her entry into politics and her romance with Denis Thatcher, a successful businessman who allowed her to change career paths from scientific research to law and politics.

And so the design is established; we move back and forth through time, touching on Maggie’s Greatest Hits. We watch her win election, stand up to her party’s establishment and ascend to power. We revisit IRA bombings, the economic troubles and her flinty response, the Falkland Islands War, and finally, the failure of communism and the end of the Cold War.

And while Roach gets most of the film’s most leaden lines - she’s saddled with having to deliver a lot the bumper sticker-style campaign sloganeering - the movie’s most shocking lapse is a montage in which Streep dances with what looks to be bizarro-world versions of Nelson Mandela and Ronald Reagan.

All in all, it’s a perfectly adequate movie that satisfies most of the requisites for pop history - it’s snarky and smarmy at the same time, and it seems unlikely to challenge anyone’s preconceived notion of who Thatcher was or is. It’s not a terribly ambitious movie, and it continues Streep’s interesting habit of working with mediocre filmmakers unlikely to produce anything likely to outshine her performance.

“People don’t think anymore, they feel,” Streep as Thatcher snarls in the film. Yes, they do - and this habit of intellectual laziness is exactly what The Iron Lady is relying on. Rather than humanizing the beast, it means to domesticate her. How very cute she is.

The Iron Lady 85 Cast: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Richard E. Grant Director: Phyllida Lloyd Rating: PG-13, for some violent images and brief nudity Running time: 104 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 01/13/2012

Upcoming Events