For a biopic about one of the most partisan and controversial politicians in British history, The Iron Lady is strangely... apolitical. I'm not a fan of Margaret Thatcher. I don't think she's the devil incarnate or the worst Prime Minister in history and I do accept that she did some good, but the overwhelming majority of the decisions she took were terrible ones that ruined lives. Of course, you might not hold that view. You might think she's the best Prime Minister since Churchill (as she is referred to during the film), but if you come into this film expecting to see her decisions and thought-making process really scrutinised, you'll leave disappointed. If you expect to see a film that details the reasons for the polarised opinions of her premiership, you'll leave disappointed. If you expect to see a film of any real substance, you'll leave disappointed. In trying not to annoy anyone, writer Abi Morgan and director Phyllida Lloyd have made a film that will annoy everyone.
For the first half-hour or forty minutes, the film almost never leaves Thatcher's house. The 84-year-old former Prime Minister is shown buying a pint of milk and a paper from the corner shop and taking them back home to eat breakfast with her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent), whom she chastises for putting too much butter on his toast and complains to about the price of milk. Thatcher's assistant walks in and Denis vanishes just as she tells an empty chair to eat its egg. Her husband is dead and she is hallucinating. The film is set in 2009, shortly before the unveiling of her official portrait in 10 Downing Street and portrays a sad, lonely woman struggling to cope with the loss of her husband and the oncoming dementia.
Streep is magnificent, absolutely brilliant and utterly convincing as Thatcher, both as the ambitious and power-hungry young woman and as the frail and lonely old woman (the even younger Thatcher played by young actress Alexandra Roach). She effortlessly conveys Thatcher's hubris and hunger for power and easily evokes sympathy for the confused old woman pining for her beloved husband and desperate to see her son Mark, now living half a world away in South Africa. It's such a pity that the rest of the film can't live up to Streep's performance. Thatcher is trapped inside her house and the film is trapped inside the confines of Morgan and Lloyd's limited ambitions.
When we finally leave Thatcher's house, we're taken along a frustratingly erratic and brief look at her political career - from her beginnings as a grocer's daughter inspired by her father's passionate oratory, to a stuffy dinner with local Conservatives looking for a prospective candidate, to Denis' proposal and a holiday with her children Carol and Mark to her first day in the House of Commons, a dispatch-box clash with the Labour Shadow Minister, her decision to run for the leadership of her party, clashes with Ministers over the budget, the Brighton Bombing, her decision to go to war over the Falkland Islands and the decisions that cost her her colleagues' support - the poll tax and the European Union - to her final day in office.
The glimpses of the past are brief and do nothing more than tell us what happened. For example, Thatcher and her then-Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Stewart Head) are confronted by Michael Heseltine (Richard E. Grant) and other Cabinet members over their newly-leaked budget. The "wets" are concerned that she is cutting public spending too quickly and urge her and Howe to slow their plans. Thatcher replies, "Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it." What medicine? Why does the patient require it? Why was the response to her policies so visceral? These questions, and many more, are never answered, or even asked. Her decision to close hundreds of mines is all but glossed over: she says they must be closed, and we see stock footage of the Miners' Strike and then protesters attack her car. In a way it's an appropriate metaphor for her Premiership: barrelling along and sweeping aside ordinary people as she goes inexorably onwards. The tens of thousands of people who were put out of a job by the pit closures go unmentioned, as does the devastation on local communities. What of her mass privatisation of nationalised industries? Barely mentioned. Former Conservative Prime Minister and then-elder statesman Harold Macmillan derided Thatcher for "selling off the family silver" but apparently we needed more scenes of her imagining her dead husband so that never gets a mention. Neither does her legacy of greed, deregulation and neo-liberalism that would cause a massive financial crisis 25 years later.
The mass unemployment, the gap between rich and poor growing inexorably, the devastating blows struck against British industry that are still being felt to this very day, her savage deflationary policies that cost real people their lives and livelihoods are all cast aside. When one Minister questions the fairness of the Poll Tax, she gives him a lecture on social responsibility and tells him to shut up. It is that, and her bullying and humiliation of her closest ally, Howe, which leads to her downfall. The film implies that but for her colleagues' cowardice, she could have pressed on with the Poll Tax, which was apparently as necessary as the "medicine" she gave to the economy at the start of her Premiership. Brief clips from the Poll Tax Riots are shown, but again, the underlying reasons are completely ignored. It's incredibly frustrating.
As the film draws to a close, Thatcher packs up her dead husband's clothes and banishes the memory of him. As he walks away, she calls after the hallucination, tears streaming down her cheeks. It's a touching moment, but by this point the scenes between her and Denis had been so over-done that they'd lost almost all their impact. Then, the film ends. It's a truly unsatisfying ending to a wasteful and pointless film.
Watch The Iron Lady for another tour de force from Meryl Streep. Once again, she does not play the character, she lives the character, but that's all it really is: a hollow film supported entirely by Streep. Take her performance away and you'd have nothing more than a second-rate biopic that goes through the motions, piles on the fanciful imaginings of an elderly widow, throws you some flashbacks and some facts and says "make up your own mind".
6 out of 10.
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