The Iron Lady Review: London Calling

This time of year is often wrought with Oscar bait of varying manipulative degree, and no film genre encapsulates this notion as reliably as the biopic. As long as modern cinema has existed, accolades have been showered upon countless actors strutting their craft onscreen with glorified impressions of other people. Some of these performances are more deserving of praise than others, particularly when they transcend mimicry and enter the territory of pure character embodiment. This is what Meryl Streep has done in The Iron Lady, an otherwise oddly structured film that skimps on historical heft in favor of focusing on Margaret Thatcher’s idiosyncratic decline into present-day dementia. Few political figures have been as consequential and polarizing as Thatcher, British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, but director Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) seemingly chooses to avoid exploring the details of Thatcher’s parliamentary reign, attempting instead to draw a more personal portrait of grief, guilt, pride and regret. In spite of the film’s rather lurching trajectory and curious omission of noteworthy historical context, Streep’s extraordinary transformation, aided by glorious work from the makeup department, provides a soul for both The Iron Lady as a film and a subject.

The core foundation of the movie is established in the opening scene, as Thatcher purchases a pint of milk from a neighborhood grocer, her identity lost in the sea of impatient fellow patrons who dismiss her as another feeble elder taking too long at the checkout. Upon returning to her flat, Thatcher fixes breakfast and engages in mundane conversation with her husband, Denis (the lovely Jim Broadbent), about the increase in dairy prices. When a concerned caregiver enters the room and interrupts, viewers are jolted to the reality that Denis actually exists only within the confines of Thatcher’s hallucinatory mind. He’s been dead since 2003, but remains the sturdiest presence in Thatcher’s life as the two carry on dialogue throughout the film as routine and comfortingly personal as one would expect from a long-married couple. The tactic of implementing Denis’ ghost as the most primary character other than Thatcher herself makes for an unconventional portraiture that looks at the life of its subject through the perspective of a diminishing memory.

Now in her eighties and struggling to maintain lucidity and accept the reality of the loss of her husband, Thatcher thrusts herself, and thus the audience, into her past via Abi Morgan’s tenuous, time-traveling script that never stays in one place long enough to generate genuine cohesion. An initially promising look at a young, Oxford-bound Thatcher (Alexandra Roach) ably sets the tone for her career in government by illustrating an unwavering conviction to her conservative values as she defies the stifling gender roles of the mid-20^th century. The problem is, the defining platform of her entire administration isn’t explored any deeper than vague references to her party’s distaste for unions and a segment centered on Thatcher’s divisive strategy regarding the Falklands War. Instead, the topic is most often broached courtesy of the timid, shortcut method of dreaded montages, mostly consisting of archived news footage and such reenacted images as anti-Thatcherism protesters turning the streets of London into a landfill, and brief glimpses of a smiling Ronald Reagan.

Moments of gravity and poignancy are achieved when Thatcher reveals snippets of her belief system that help convey a connection between her private personality and public persona. One particular diatribe regarding her tendency to value thoughts and ideas over feelings (“It used to be about trying to do something,” Thatcher laments. “Now, it’s all about trying to be something.”) fine-tunes the no-nonsense basis of her nature and sets the proverbial stage for Streep’s tour de force. Thatcher’s thunderous monologues before Parliament are fun to behold, but the most affecting moments of the film occur as the aging Thatcher begins to reflect on the cost of her emotional detachment, yearning for a relationship with her estranged son and perusing old family keepsakes.

Lloyd’s film never quite strikes a balance between the probing character study it strives to become and the political biopic it’s marketed as, and the failure to establish the movie in either of these categories results in a patchwork of muddled dramaturgy that neither educates nor enthralls to its full potential. Luckily, the marvel of Streep’s artistic achievement helps redeem some of the filmmaking flaws and single-handedly makes The Iron Lady worth watching, even though the depths of the titular nickname are never explored.

Images courtesy of Alex Bailey, Pathe Productions Ltd., The Weinstein Co. and IMDbPro.