Doug PollardThe Corrosion of an Iron Lady
As far as I'm concerned, I'm still Prime Minister
I know this is probably heresy, even lese majeste, but for long stretches of The Iron Lady, I was bored out of my skull.
Just as I find thirty minutes of Dame Edna Everage about as much as I can stand before the schtick wears thin, Meryl Streep’s music hall ‘turn’ as The Magatollah became less amusing, and less convincing, as the movie wore on.
It was akin to watching a sci-fi movie in which the alien carries a device to conceal its true appearance, which invariably breaks down.
As the Magatollah once again berated her husband/cabinet/the House of Commons, the camouflage generator went on the fritz – Streep/Thatcher/Streep/Thatch er flashing before my eyes.
And although the actress manages a brilliant vocal and gestural impersonation, in the end, she fails because of The Walk.
Her Magatollah swans about like the actress she is. The original had a highly characteristic rapid march, with forward lean and bent head, like a thoroughly annoyed tortoise on speed, in a tearing hurry to get somewhere she didn’t want to go.
Streep misses this completely, though as the present day Baroness she does manage a plausible old-lady-shuffle echo of it.
And it is as the corroded remnant of former glory that Streep really shines. Unshowy, unsparing, and, as I can testify from watching my own mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s, utterly convincing, this is some of the best work Streep has ever done. The camouflage circuit doesn’t fritz once.
The rest of the cast are more or less superfluous, which is just as well, as – with one or two honourable exceptions – they are woefully miscast and poorly written, little more than black and white cartoons drawn by an unenthusiastic amateur.
The scripts has many failings, but the biggest is the failure to show how Thatcher was deformed by power into The Magatollah.
In the beginning she was genuinely inspiring, a breath of fresh air. But she became increasingly paranoid and dictatorial. England became an Orwellian nightmare, in which those who were not, as she said, “one of us” were subjected to surveillance and heavy-handed policing.
The film gestures to her Churchillian pretensions, but she developed Queenly delusions too. She took to rallying the troops, turning up at disasters, dispensing solace to the injured, and referring to herself in the third person, most famously in the phrase that killed her career, “We are a grandmother.” None of that here.
Missing too, is the flirtatiousness she employed alongside the bludgeon in order to get her way.
Nor do we get much sense of what formed her, what drove her, made her who and what she became. Instead we get a few lazy standard-issue biopic clichés – the dutiful daughter, the swot, the frustrated housewife.
The movie will probably win Streep an Oscar, and it probably should. But the definitive account of Margaret Thatcher is yet to come. Like the (privatised) State Funeral, it will, unfortunately, have to wait till she is dead.
Let us hope that in the meantime this glossy tabloid rendering of one of the most destructive and divisive Prime Ministers in British history does not succeed in rewriting history.
There's always a bit of romantisicm about historical figures. I think that directors and producers don't want to alienate their audience.
I do agree with you about the wooden characters, there were several that just didn't help the plot at all.