I’m not the most politically aware person in the world. But, I do love the movies. And after hearing so many people discuss Meryl Streep’s hugely winning performance (surprise, surprise) as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, I wanted to see it.
What I found interesting about Film Studies in the first place is a film’s connection with history, with the current cultural and political climate, and with changing and fluctuating attitudes at the time of the film’s release; some movies are best watched at the time of their release, sort of like a dish best served hot, and if watched later, it can be difficult to understand without a timely context. It’s something I didn’t fully consider prior to engaging in my major. The film then, takes on a politically intuitive meaning and connects people to a political issue, even if they’re unaware. That is, if the film is done well and doesn’t go above the heads of the masses. The film should then take on a political body that can move someone’s intuition in the way a body can move a soul.
I believe the conservative climate in today’s modern world elicited the need to present Margaret Thatcher on the silver screen. This movie could have brought to light so many big issues and demonstrate the idea of, “Look how far we’ve come, but look at the space we’re still occupying two decades later.” The fact is, this film dabbles with these issues on a level that is skin-deep and therefore, rather disappointing.
The Iron Lady was somewhat confused about how it wanted to portray Margaret Thatcher, which actually worked well considering it never spun or presented her either as reviled monster, or a great mover and martyr for the causes of her country. She simply wears these hats (along with the literal ridiculous hats donned in the film): a ‘woman politician’ struggling to maintain leadership in a world full of men; a somewhat weak leader who was still unwilling to bend to the needs of the country; an ignorant optimist with blinders on who uses the prices of butter and margarine to indicate how ‘in touch’ she actually is with the British people; a creation of brilliant campaign manager who refuses to compromise her string of pearls given to her by her sweet, doting husband, which in the end seems to work to her advantage in office. Whichever of these filmic mythologies you choose to subscribe to depends on your attitude towards Reganomics, Thatcher-ism, and turmoil surrounding labour marches and the Falkland Wars. Meryl plays all these parts very well indeed, but the film fails to give her the chance to really dig into one or the other; it’s as if the idea to cast her as the Iron Lady was primary over how the Iron Lady would be portrayed on screen.
The film functions then, as an incredibly basic, conventional and thesis-less biopic. Much of the past, the controversies, the reasons why Thatcher was hated and/or loved, and spent so many years in office prior to her resignation are told through a series of flashy, quick-cutted montages which feature a young Thatcher in university, real news footage from the time Thatcher was in office, and moments of tested loyalties and bickering within her own party. The beginning of the film hints slightly at discordant notes between Margaret and her mother that are powerful though never explored and in the end, the past comes across as a seeming blur. The creative rationale behind this seems to be that the past is told as a series of break-and-enter memories by Thatcher herself, who is an old, confused woman with Dementia on the verge of insanity and who fully states she “doesn’t recognize [herself]”.
This past-to-present way of storytelling in this case seems to try and elicit sympathy from the viewer towards this poor old lady who has nothing and nobody, even after all the great and terrible things she accomplished; who can go out to the grocery store and be unrecognizable to the masses, who don’t care who she is, and is, compared to the butter and margarine conversation she has while in office, now out of touch with 49p charged for a bottle of milk. The film also functions as a long-standing love story between Thatcher and her husband Denis who is loyal albeit almost too loyal, judging by the Denis from her Dementia-addled fantasies in which he becomes an intrusive, annoying presence in her aged life. I think we as humans seem to relate to great people in history and great characters in fictional history through who they love and how they love, and the film uses ‘love’ as a tactic; a smoke-and-mirrors distraction from the clear-cut issues that could have, and should have made up the hefty bulk of this film.
I respect Meryl Streep as an actress so much and her work here is nothing short of incredible; not only does she play the grandmotherly, modest Thatcher in both the beginning of her career and the slow ending of her life, but she also embraces the opportunity to play the hard-headed ignoramus politician who is hungry for votes and on another plane of reality.
That someone can be so vulnerable and so disgustingly brazen in the same movie is truly a gift. However, the gutsy performance of Streep heavily outweighs the gutless handling of such tense material and so despite great work, this is not necessarily a movie I would recommend.
