Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Quick Impressions:
Because I’m an obsessive fanatic (for no apparent reason) when it comes to the Oscars, I’ve been dying to see this movie. At the Critics’ Choice Awards, Viola Davis beat Meryl Streep. At the Golden Globes, Meryl Streep beat Viola Davis. Do you know how frustrating all of this is to someone who until last night had not had the opportunity to see the performance given by Meryl Streep? (And who knows when Albert Nobbs and We Need to Talk about Kevin will decide to grace the greater Austin area with their presence.)
Anyway, if you’re dying to see how Meryl Streep’s performance stacks up against Viola Davis’s wonderful work in The Help, then watching The Iron Lady will be tremendously satisfying. If, however, you make the foolish mistake of watching The Iron Lady because you want to know more about Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, then you will be bitterly, bitterly disappointed—or perhaps befuddled is a better word, possibly even as befuddled as Streep’s Thatcher herself appears to be for most of the movie as she grows old and slips into dementia in seclusion (in front of theater goers worldwide).
Once—getting tired of hearing half my friends incessantly praise Reagan and Thatcher and the other half incessantly condemn them—I tried to learn about Margaret Thatcher. As someone who was born in 1979 and four years old in 1983, I can’t rely on my own impressions of her first years as PM or her handling of the crisis in the Falkland Islands. So I bought a book about Thatcher and Reagan.
I read over one-hundred pages of that book (no easy feat with a teething baby on your lap).
Here is what I learned: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were both strongly influenced by their fathers who had a lot in common. Margaret Thatcher’s father was a grocer. Ronald Reagan’s father was not. Yet the two fathers were a lot alike in ways that may not be apparent on the surface and certainly won’t be mentioned in that book. Reading between the lines, you soon realize they were alike in their differences, alike because of their differences, alike because both men had a clear, solid, black-and-white relationship to grocers. One was a grocer. The other was not.
Apparently that book is spot on. If The Iron Lady teaches us one thing, it’s that Margaret Thatcher’s father was a grocer. This was her defining trait, the source of her successes and her failures, the reason she obsessed over the price of dairy products all her life. Perhaps Abi Morgan (who wrote the screenplay) read the same book about Thatcher that I did. Obviously, she gave up on it, too, and filled in the gaps from Thatcher’s years in office by watching YouTube clips.
If you’re looking for history, here’s what you learn. Thatcher (who unfailingly wore a serene Madonna blue until she reached the pinnacle of her power) did some things that people really hated when she first became Prime Minister. She refused to budge. People lost their jobs and died. They got really mad. They rioted. She still refused to budge because as a grocer’s daughter, she knew the price of butter. Then she refused to negotiate with terrorists in the Falklands. Lives were lost, but Britain triumphed. Everyone loved Margaret Thatcher. Somebody even wrote a catchy rock song called, “I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher” (though if that’s the excuse the singer gave his girlfriend, she should have broken up with him on the spot and spared herself heartache). Then Thatcher suddenly wore only blood red and surrendered completely to the dark side of the force. Reeling in her military and diplomatic triumphs, she turned her Darth-Vader-like power on a new enemy–sloppy spelling. She soon learned a humiliating lesson. Causing numerous deaths is one thing; correcting a man’s spelling in front of his peers is taking things too far. She fell from power.
What can we take away from all of this? Falls from power can happen so suddenly and without warning. You never see them coming—particularly if you know absolutely no facts about the events leading up to the fall. The movie shows Thatcher’s virtue of persistence slide into the vice of megalomania with about as much subtlety and sense as the Star Wars prequels use in showing the emperor’s rise to power and villainy or Anakin’s surrender to the Dark Side. If she really behaved like that—“I am the Prime Minister”—with such blindness to Parliamentary procedure or even to the fact that elections exist, someone certainly needed to ask her the never-more-apt question, “Who died and made you queen?”
The Good:
That said, I must admit that I enjoyed every moment of the movie from start to finish. You can sigh and roll your eyes at the strange portrayal of the events of Thatcher’s time in office and still thoroughly enjoy the movie because most of the film takes place at the end of Thatcher’s life as she struggles with dementia and hallucinations and reflects back over her past. The political flashbacks are more like strange, intercalary music videos spliced into the movie to make it more strange.
The best parts of the film, the parts where Streep and the script most shine, come in the portrayal of Thatcher in her secluded decline. (I can’t claim, of course, that Thatcher would have wanted this kind of stuff in a movie about her.) This aspect of The Iron Lady feels more like a quirky play put on by an under-appreciated amateur dramatic society.
Streep plays the elderly and suffering Thatcher beautifully. Watching, I was captivated at once and reminded powerfully of my own grandmother in her decline. When Thatcher overhears caregivers whispering that she may be hiding her pills, when she thunderously insists that she is perfectly well, she reminds me so much of my grandma, involuntarily losing her mental soundness as she succumbed to a series of small strokes. One day, Grandma tried to hide some food she hadn’t eaten, telling me gleefully like a kid getting away with something, “Maybe your mother won’t know.” I told her the painful truth. “Mom makes you eat because if you don’t, you’ll get weak and die.” Such shock and confusion on her face!
Streep’s increasingly unsound Thatcher has a similar quality. The performance feels very real. And the way Thatcher tries to “keep calm and carry on,” willing herself to sanity (having no other alternative) struck a chord with me, too.
What makes this movie good is Meryl Streep’s performance, and giving a strong performance in a strange movie certainly does draw attention to the strength of your acting. (Maybe she and Glenn Close have some kind of weird bet going on involving getting an Oscar by being outstanding in a quirky film.)
In fact, Streep is so captivating that as you watch the film, it feels really good and engaging throughout. It’s only when you get to the end that you realize, Actually that was kind of strange.
Best Scene:
What made the greatest impression on me was the scene in the parking garage when Thatcher’s colleague and adviser tells her that he’s betting on her to win the election and then drives away. What happens next made me realize that the type of policy that people like me read about in books is all highly theoretical. When you’re closer to events as they actually happen, you must react somewhat differently. It’s human nature.
Best Surprise:
The best surprise comes near the beginning of the film when you realize that Thatcher’s circumstances are somewhat different from what she first imagines.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Meryl Streep):
Streep does an uncannily good imitation of Margaret Thatcher, but that’s not really a surprise, is it? Her performance elevates the material to such an extent that you don’t even notice how weird some of the scenes are until Streep’s not on the screen anymore to win you over.
I loved the moment near the beginning of the film when after helping her husband, Dennis, dress for work, Thatcher notices out the window that he’s forgotten his scarf. What she says, the way she says it—Streep takes an ordinary line and creates a perfect and profound moment. I’ll bet Meryl Streep could make a riveting film about a woman who sits alone in a room and reads the dictionary for two hours.
Jim Broadbent is also excellent as Thatcher’s supportive husband, Dennis. To me, one of the most fascinating things about the film is how he behaves so differently in the flashbacks when he’s much more critical and less reassuring.
Visually:
As we drove home from the theater, my husband pointed out, “In the beginning of the movie she always wore blue. But then at the end, she always wore red. Why was that?”
We brainstormed several answers. The real Thatcher actually dressed that way. Young women look demure in blue, and older women look strong instead of provocative in red. Thatcher went gray, dyed her hair red, and dressed to match it. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was finally safe to wear red in the West. She had such a good friendship with Ronald Reagan and the Republican party in the U.S. that she wore red to show support. Her military triumphs had both stained her with blood and made her regal. In youth, she could only afford that one blue dress, so when she was older, she wanted to look as different as possible. She donated all her non-red clothes to Oxfam, so that her younger self would quit criticizing the woman she had become. She had changed a lot, and the red outfit was a subtler visual cue than a Darth Vader suit.
Basically, we don’t know why it happened, but the shift from blue to red definitely happened and was clearly a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers whatever their reasoning might have been. (Maybe it was a redshift because she was a declining star moving away from us. Does that actually make sense? If only Wikipedia were working today, so I could read up on Doppler shifts with minimal effort!)
I also liked the visual metaphor of the final scene of the film (although I’m not so sure about washing a tea cup).
The Negatives:
This movie isn’t bad, but it is weird. It’s like two or possibly three films in one. I don’t necessarily think its wacky presentation of history is a negative (although, it’s definitely not a plus). And I do think that its portrayal of age and senility is magnificent, very moving, very real. (And the make-up is so much better than the make-up in J. Edgar.)
I know nothing about the real Margaret Thatcher (except that she was a grocer’s daughter), but I’m pretty sure that she’d hate this movie. For one thing, the movie shows that she doesn’t want to be just a housewife. From the beginning, she feels destined to make a difference on the world stage, which she does. But then she turns into a powerless old woman whose son can’t be troubled with her because she chose her career over him while he was growing up. The movie is not subtle and seems bizarrely hostile toward women who feel compelled to pursue a career (however successful) outside the home. The scene where the children run after her car and beg her to come back seems incredibly ridiculous. No doubt most fathers of the period loved their children, yet they managed to go to work every day without event.
Overall:
I know I’ve been complaining a lot, but I enjoyed every minute of The Iron Lady. It offered a beautiful and poignant vignette of a woman in her twilight years. (Wouldn’t it have been a zany twist if that woman had turned out not to be Margaret Thatcher after all?) That aspect of the film was perfectly done and felt incredibly authentic.
I enjoyed the audience, too. My husband and I were the only people in the sparsely populated auditorium who were under sixty, and several audience members were very vocally “in love with Margaret Thatcher.” A responsive audience enhances any movie-going experience.
Is Meryl Streep better than Viola Davis? I’m not sure. They’re definitely in a similar situation, transcending the limits of material of shady historicity with powerful and sincere performances. Davis is awfully strong, and Meryl Streep is Meryl Streep. I need more time to think about it.