Alex Bailey/Pathe Productions/The Weinstein Company
Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher rises to power as a sort of conservative feminist in a male-dominated government.
Meryl Streep has 16 Academy Award nominations — more than any performer. She already has two Oscars. I don't begrudge her more, but this year I'd rather see Viola Davis win Best Actress for "The Help" (which might happen) or Kirsten Dunst for "Melancholia" (which won't).
Having said that, I'll add that Streep deserves whatever recognition comes her way for her work in "The Iron Lady." As Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom's first and only woman prime minister to date, Streep is convincing and astonishing -- and also eminently watchable. "The Iron Lady" isn't a great movie, but Streep is great in it. Her Thatcher is no waxwork exhibit or icon or parody. Her behavior and vocal imitation seem natural, even when she's done up in old-age makeup that is much more believable than that worn by Leonardo DiCaprio as the elderly "J. Edgar."
"The Iron Lady" is a surprising and intimate portrait of Margaret Thatcher, the first and only female Prime Minister of The United Kingdom. One of ...
Rating: PG-13 for some violent images and brief nudity
Length: 105 minutes
Released: December 30, 2011 Limited
Cast: Meryl Streep, Harry Lloyd, Richard E. Grant, Jim Broadbent, Anthony Head
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Writer: Abi Morgan
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, who previously guided Streep through the actress' most embarrassing film, "Mamma Mia!," and scripted by Abi Morgan (writer of "Shame," which has yet to reach Memphis), "The Iron Lady" is rather random in structure, and it seems to lack a political point of view, as if the filmmakers wanted to be "fair" — a dubious notion, at best. This hasn't stopped the movie from upsetting liberals and conservatives alike, especially in England, where "The Iron Lady" has been criticized by right-wingers as an act of character assassination and by leftists as a whitewash.
Like her loyal friend and conservative ally, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher (now 86) remains one of the most revered and hated political leaders of her era, for her strong anti-union, pro-business philosophy, her cuts in social services and tax rates for the rich, and so on. The movie touches on these controversies, but more insistently presents Thatcher as a heroic sort of right-wing feminist (a word she probably hated) rising to power within a male-dominated government, and as a sympathetic, ultimately somewhat tragic figure, isolated by age and dementia, and carrying on conversations with her dead husband (Jim Broadbent).
"The Iron Lady" unreels as a series of flashbacks, which interrupt the more or less "present day" depiction of the aged Thatcher, who seems flummoxed by the East Indian dance rhythms that play inside the neighborhood corner shop and by the pop-music ringtone of an assistant's cellphone.
The visits to the past reveal Thatcher to have been a politically precocious grocer's daughter (the wonderful Alexandra Roach portrays the young Thatcher). "Those who can do — they must get up and do," she insists, advancing an anti-welfare-state ethos at an early age. As a role model for women as well as capitalists, she says she has no intention of remaining "silent and pretty" on the arm of some man, and states: "One's life must matter, beyond all the cooking and the cleaning and the children." Even so, the film suggests Thatcher somewhat neglected her family to pursue politics, a rather conservative notion that seems motivated more by biopic formula than by the convictions of the filmmakers.
The parallels here to the issues being discussed in the run-up to this year's U.S. presidential election are striking — more so than the filmmakers could have anticipated. "We conservatives believe in giving people the freedom and opportunity to achieve their own potential," Thatcher declares, sounding like Rick Santorum or Rick Perry on the stump; the nation, in other words, must "shake off the shackles of socialism."
"The Iron Lady" was beautifully shot by Elliot Davis ("Twilight"), whose occasional wide-angle compositions add an element of almost comic expressionism that suggests a more interesting if perhaps less entertaining movie-that-might-have-been.
"The Iron Lady" is at the Cordova Cinema and the Ridgeway Four.
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