COMMENTARY | The thing that prevented “The Iron Lady” from being a great biop was the device of depicting Lady Margaret Thatcher as a doddering old lady carrying on conversations with her dead husband, Denis.
There was far too much of that sort of thing and not enough of the fiery prime minister, shaking Great Britain out of her post-Empire decline doldrums and making that country something to be reckoned with again. One should be grateful for small favors, however. At least there was some of the latter, forcing an unwilling Britain to take the stern medicine of free market economics, smiting the Argentines hip and thigh over the Falklands, and almost being blown up by the IRA. But Thatcher’s prime ministership went by in dizzying snippets, bookended by what the film makers imagined her life is like now.
Still, Meryl Streep does an upstanding job making the greatest prime minister Britain has had since Churchill. She made one forget that there is an actress on the screen and making one think that Thatcher herself has returned, young again in the best scenes, to show us how a grocer’s daughter shattered a whole series of glass ceilings in a country still ridden by class and gender inequality.
Alexandra Roach, by the way, does an admirable job depicting the girl who became the woman during the war and immediate post war years.
The movie would have been vastly improved if it had not hewed to the idea of telling the story of an old woman remembering past glories, while holding imaginary conversations with her dead husband Denis, played by Jim Broadbent. The story itself is one of the most fascinating and inspiring political stories of the latter half of the 20th Century.
One should be grateful for small favors. The prime minister scenes are not a slam against Lady Thatcher by a long shot. She comes off pretty well next to the chestless men who inhabit the Tory Party and later her government, all of whom have the words “Who does that woman think she is?” practically imprinted on their faces. Nor do the enraged mobs which battle the police and surround her limo. One is invited to decide for oneself whether she was great or a monster.
One is inclined to think the former as the movie shows, sometimes despite itself.
