Details
Leads: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Anthony Head, Richard E. Grant, Olivia Colman, Roger Allam, Reginald Green, Alexandra Roach, Harry Lloyd
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Genre: Drama
Language: English
Run-Time: 105 minutes
Rating: PG-13 for some violent images and brief nudity
Short Description: Combining the past and present, The Iron Lady follows Margaret Thatcher's life as a wife, widow, mother, daughter, Prime Minister and frail old woman. Struggling with the changing times and loss of power, an aged Thatcher (Meryl Streep) remembers the highs and lows of her life and career as the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the twentieth Century.
Review
Karina Mitchell
Meryl Streep turns in what may be her best performance yet in Phyllida Lloyd's political biopic "The Iron Lady."
Told from the point of view of the former British prime minister, the film is a character retrospective more than an account of the rise to power of arguably the most powerful woman in the Western world. It is strangely de-politicized in that sense.
Streep conquers the role of Thatcher, capturing her nuances to perfection. The film opens with Thatcher as an octogenarian, suffering from a failing memory and having suffered a series of strokes. She is seen cracking an egg for her husband, Denis, at the kitchen table and lamenting the price of milk.
The political ratio of the film is just enough to give viewers (who may not be familiar with Thatcher's 1979-1990 tenure) insight into Britain in the 1980s. It touches upon her battle with trade unions at the time and embellishes her bond with Ronald Reagan, who was a perfect match for her political ideologies.
At heart, however, "The Iron Lady" takes a stab at what the woman behind the iron facade was like.
As dementia begins to set in, we are given glimpses into Thatcher's relationship with her husband, played by Jim Broadbent, and her children, Carol (Olivia Colman), who helps care for her, and Mark, who lives in South Africa and whom the audience never sees.
Screenwriter Abi Morgan imagines Thatcher sneaking out to buy milk for her husband's breakfast tea. Denis, however, has been dead for years. That doesn't stop him from being a continual presence throughout the film, a chatty, affable man to her stiff, no-nonsense attitude.
As she goes about packing up his belongings for charity, the elderly former Tory party leader is whisked back to the time when she was a young woman - the daughter of a grocer, an Oxford graduate and a woman with political aspirations. It also tracks the courtship between her and a young Denis Thatcher and tracks their marriage during tumultuous times.
Streep dominates and is triumphant in capturing the essence of Thatcher down to each minute detail. It's not just the coiffed hair, the carriage and the characteristic tone of voice. It's the way she pulls back seamlessly from a razor-sharp woman with fierce, uncompromising leadership to a softer, aged woman reminiscing about her hey day.
In the movie, the war over the Falkland Islands forms the crux of her rise to success, as she stands up to an "Old Boy's Club", very much in evidence at Parliament. On the other end of the spectrum, we see her downfall, her bitter relationship with the unions and her strained exit from No. 10 Downing Street.
Unlike with many biopics, the subject of this one is still with us. At 86, Baroness Thatcher, the woman once simultaneously reviled and revered and described by her daughter as "cast-iron proof" with a "blotting paper" memory, has become a recluse, isolated by growing dementia. In fact, British Prime Minister David Cameron recently denounced the timing of the film, saying it was "insensitive" and could have waited "for another day."
If it does, it is well deserved.
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