Film Review: The Iron Lady

The Iron Lady. Rated M (mature themes and violence). 105 minutes. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd. Screenplay by Abi Morgan.

Not since Charlize Theron’s brilliant performance as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003) has an actress disappeared so completely beneath the skin of their character. But where Ms Theron was equally immersed in a compelling drama about increasingly desperate personal circumstances, Meryl Streep’s superb Margaret Thatcher is adrift in a movie that fails, entirely, to equal the sum of not insignificant parts.

When we first meet Ms Streep’s elderly Baroness Thatcher, she is shuffling about in a corner store buying a carton of milk – the price of which, she later bemoans to the ghost of her dead husband Dennis (Jim Broadbent), has gone up. It’s a curious and domestically banal introduction to a film about one of the most powerful, ambitious and divisive political leaders of the 20th century – and Britain’s first female Prime Minister.

What follows are lots of MTV-inspired clips of a glamorous Mrs Thatcher striding around surrounded by lots of men, grainy stock newsreels of the ugly, violent, civil unrest (the infamous “Poll Tax” riots, the 1984 Miners’ Strike and 1981’s Brixton riots) that accompanied a good many of Prime Minister Thatcher’s social and economic reform-driven policies. Brief engagements with her younger self (played by Alexandra Roach), the 1982 Falklands War, a very long button sewing-on sequence, and some idle chatter about the emergence of the single currency we now know as the Euro, round out the determined political unconsciousness of it all.

Ms Morgan’s reductivist screenplay and Ms Lloyd’s (Mamma Mia!) undisciplined camera seem happiest when their star is moping around in the dark – scratching about the place for some semblance of the commanding influence she once wielded on the world stage. What might have been useful would have been a script that stopped fluffing around in the kitchen and explored the vast wealth of potential an intelligent film about Margaret Thatcher might have exposed. Meryl Streep’s performance in that film would truly have been something to behold.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.