This film is dreadful.
If the trailer above was actually representative of the final product you would have had something worthy of the woman who ruled Great Britain with an iron will. However, the trailer is not the journey you take with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady.
That the film actually disrespects and marginalizes a woman as large as Margaret Thatcher is movie making malpractice.
Peter Travers is his review long before the film broke, elevates the premise of it to “a kind of female spin on King Lear” and is seduced by this torturous view of Thatcher from the world of dementia.
But why anyone would take the subject of Margaret Thatcher and reduce the drama by putting the lens inside her brain as she declines into this state is beyond me, especially since the way it’s done dwarfs her life, which was of major significance.
Conservatives would be right in encouraging their readers, audiences and talk radio listeners to stay far away from this travesty. People like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and others have the power to make an impact if they do.
It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers and producers would think people would jump to see Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and I’m not surprised in the least she won the Golden Globe for her performance. Playing the role of Margaret Thatcher is an actor’s dream, but delivering a performance of someone of Thatcher’s stature in the throes of dementia is the ultimate test of the actor’s actual craft.
If you want to know the seriousness of the filmmakers, in Ms. Streep’s acceptance speech she said, We made this for 25 cents in 5 minutes. This says it all. Weinstein & company obviously had little to no respect for what the subject of Margaret Thatcher required and earned, but obviously didn’t care. Betting on Streep is never money ill spent.
However, it’s unfathomable that anyone could read the initial screenplay and decide to accept the premise, especially given the richness of the woman’s life that could have been mined to great dramatic impact and historic relevance.
Meryl Streep is truly at her best as the aging Thatcher, made possible through the wondrous makeup artistry of Marese Langan. It’s just too bad Streep is stuck in a film that offers no hope of her soaring, regardless of Streep’s herculean talents, which seem boxed in by the dryness of the vision. It’s hard not to pity poor Jim Broadbent, as her husband hallucination Denis Thatcher, who is reduced to a comic distraction and annoyance, though through no fault of his own.
Director Phyllida Lloyd, who also did Mama Mia with Streep, fumbles her way through the film with Abi Morgan’s screenplay not worthy of its subject or that actors’ performances. I’ll wait for any film directed by Lloyd to come to cable from now on.
Margaret Thatcher was a larger than life figure when she was in British politics, a historic leader, but when you consider her gender, not to mention her philosophy and leadership style and choices, her arrival on the world stage was important. What she did and the politics she employed were groundbreaking and horrifying, especially to a liberal like myself, her embrace of austerity and personal coldness to the plights of people worthy of dissection and depiction.
That this film comes in 2012, as economic austerity hits Europe, offers huge opportunities and Ms. Streep’s performance teases what might have been.
A controversial conservative giant, Margaret Thatcher seen through her decline and reminiscences is a legitimate choice, but the fact that the telling through this lens turns sour as you watch and leaves the viewer with only a paltry sense of who Mrs. Thatcher was in history is why this film not only falls flat, but is a cheap imitation to what is required when the subject is so large.
That Iron Lady needed to be sold through a trailer like the one above is simple. No matter how brilliant Streep’s performance, and it’s all that, a representative clip showing the majority of the film with Margaret Thatcher fighting dementia would have turned off audiences in droves and for very good reasons.
This piece has been updated upon Ms. Streep winning the Golden Globe.
Havent seen this one yet- viola davis and octavia spenser have a well deserved edge in best actress and supporting actress race. Its rather odd- Davis was mentored by Streep and Streep helped Davis into the groundbreaking Doubt etc.. If we want to talk about women inf ilm this year Davis has something almost no othe r black actress has ever gotten- a lead role in a blocbuster hollywood film, oh and that role is for a gal over 40. Its unheard of really.
The Thatcher film seems to be hugely controversial and is causing heartburn in austerity Europe. Thatcher deserves better. Despite I despise her act against unions.
She is one smart lady- I saw an interview with her on CSPAN from yrs ago on their booknotes tour. Incredible. If I can find the link I will post it so yall can watch the Iron Lady in real life talk about her life. Of note was her refusal to particpate in tv debates- but she was willing to have a one on one for 2 hrs primetime-which she said is much more needed. And she is right.
found it! watch this for the real iron lady-
http://www.booktv.org/Watch/3834/The+Downing+Street+Years.aspx
People should absolutely watch this instead of seeing Iron Lady.
Thanks so much for posting this, Art.
yea ive got it up on my fb page also! she is an icon. her last public act of note was criticizing Bush Jr’s Iraq invasion. for a woman to hold power for a dozen years is extrodinary. her survival of the blast is a testament of courage and strength. she recounts that day in the cspan interview.
Years ago, when word got out that Oliver Stone was going to make a movie about George W. Bush , everyone expected the film to be hard hitting in the way it portrayed him since Stone had made no secret of his disdain for our former fearless leader. When it was released people were shocked to find that Stone had Josh Brolin portray him as a sympathetic character. Many years before that George C. Scott portrayed Mussolini in a T.V. movie and he too was made to look sympathetic. I read the reviews of the Thatcher film and the reviewers said much the same as you. I remember thinking; why, when you have such rich material to draw on would you end up portraying her as a doddering old fool. It seems as if the passage of time just has this way of softening up how people look at leaders who were never soft themselves.
If it was anyone but Streep and Broadbent, I doubt if it would have found distributors.
I remember that George S. Scott performance, as well as Brolin’s recently. Ignoramuses on the politics and history is part of it.
There have been some teasers on “Game Change,” too. The short clips of Julianne Moore as Palin made me wince. I hope it was just a bad glimpse, because otherwise this could be really hard to watch. ”Recount” was very well done, though it’s way too painful to sit through for me.
Hmmmm…I haven’t seen the movie, but based on your review, I am going to skip it.
My take is that treating Mussolini and Bush with sympathy and Thatcher and Palin with disdain is a gender thing. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Tell us how you really feel about the film Ms. marsh…don’t hold back.
Ms. Marsh, I must admit that I happened to like “The Iron Lady,” but I understand and respect your well-articulated reasons as to why you don’t. The film is certainly not a conventional docudrama in the traditional sense, and anyone who is going to see this film with the expectation of either worshiping at the foot of Margaret Thatcher’s altar or ridiculing the woman’s conservative politics, well, they’re just going to be sorely disappointed.
Speaking as someone who definitely did not see eye-to-eye with her politically, I found that the film actually humanized Mrs. Thatcher for me, by inviting me to first see past the well-crafted caricature of the conservative lioness and anti-labor scold that the conservative right has created of her, and then allow me to understand where she was coming from, and finally respect her as the leader she was.
Speaking for myself, I saw Meryl Streep’s protrait of Dame Thatcher as an elderly woman fighting the ever-tightening grip of dementia, in part through her own reminiscences, as a testament about life coming full circle, and I don’t think it belittled her in the slightest. We all get old, even the greatest among us, and we should not shy away from its most uncomfortable aspects.
Anyway, I found the film interesting, fascinating even, so you can take my views for what they’re worth. But if you’re expecting “The Iron Lady” to be a political or feminist yarn, then it’s not for you. It’s about a woman whose personality and intellect are every bit as complex and complicated as our own, and not about the cartoon character so many of us on the left have spent the better part of our adult lifetimes despising. It’s a biography that stubbornly refuses to take sides regarding its subject, and that will be unsettling and frustrating to some.