The Iron Lady - review

Streep is simply brilliant as Thatcher in every way: her voice, her posture, her movements and facial expressions, her frightening and sudden imperiousness. She completely inhabits her character and, thanks to her own skill and some first-rate prosthetics, plays her equally successfully from her early thirties to her mid-eighties. She can hold a scene just with her eyes.

Crucially, Streep herself has the charisma to match that of Thatcher, and unmistakeable intelligence. Even the slight outsider-ishness that remains from her American background works for her, as Thatcher is herself always the intruder into the clubby man's world of Westminster. She remains more beautiful than Thatcher - better bone structure, finer skin - but that too only makes her role the more effective. It's an Oscar-worthy act and the film is worth seeing for Streep alone.

The Iron Lady is notably well-played otherwise, too. As the young Margaret, newcomer Alexandra Roach is excellent - bright-eyed and open-mouthed in adulation of her father Alderman Roberts - while as the young Denis Thatcher, Harry Lloyd is quirky, dashing and fanciable. Playing the elderly Denis, Jim Broadbent does a broad sitcom turn, over-amiable perhaps but providing some necessary light relief. Olivia Colman, last seen as the battered wife in Tyrannosaur, is superb as loyal but ghastly daughter Carol, gobstopper voice and all.

The problems lie with the script by Abi Morgan, the writer of The Hour and the upcoming Shame. She, presumably in consultation with the director and star, has shaped the film to be about ageing and loss, experiences heightened in the case of Thatcher by the scale of her career but universal nonetheless, so that we have here fiction and drama, not just a biopic.

To a large extent she has pulled this high ambition off - The Iron Lady really is, among other things, a feminist revision of King Lear - but at the cost of almost completely blanking out Thatcher's political importance, which is equally unsatisfactory whether you despise or revere her.
The film takes place over just two days in the present. It is eight years since Denis's death and Margaret, now fairly senile, is, with Carol's help, trying to shape up finally to throwing out his clothes. But, in her confusion, he is still with her in the room, cracking jokes and jollying her along - "Attagirl!" - as he always did. As she struggles through a dinner party and a visit to a doctor, various triggers - terrorism on TV, a home movie, a Falklands victory statuette - spark memories of the key events of her life, in pretty straightforward chronological order, conveniently enough.

Thus everything we see, even when it's documentary footage, must be accepted as not necessarily what actually happened but as how she remembers it now in her distress (just like in We Need to Talk about Kevin). As a result it has to be excused both particular inaccuracies (Thatcher was not on the scene when Airey Neave was assassinated - for a reality check on the whole film, you can see her actual reaction to the news on YouTube) and its overall slant. So much has been left out (including all her great political achievements, such as the historic consequences of her intransigent stance on the Soviet Union in league with Ronald Reagan). Instead, it's the story of how she made her way in a man's world with the support of the ever-dependable Denis.

For this is a women's film through and through. Laughably, entire scenes are conducted through the medium of shoes. Her first entry into the masculine enclave of the Commons is represented by a shot of her black and white court shoes clacking past dozens of men's Oxfords. In the final scene, when Denis bids her farewell, she is tormented by the thought that he is going without the half-brogues she has selected for him. Clothes throughout matter enormously, traversing a palette through the blues to fierce red.

The director, Phyllida Lloyd, previously made Mamma Mia!, also with Meryl of course, the most successful British film of all time - and The Iron Lady is best understood as a mutant hybrid of that musical horror and The King's Speech. There's even a speech-therapy scene, while many of the whizzing montages of her career come perilously close to music videos, with overpowering soundtracks always verging on turning into the National Anthem. When she leaves Number 10, scarlet roses shed their petals to the soaring notes of Casta Diva ("pure goddess") from Bellini's Norma.

This approach - eliminating the politics, symphonically endorsing her rise in a man's world while plangently focusing on the losses in age all must endure - brilliantly snookers all those who want to hate her. How can any feminist be against the story shown here? Even when she begins to behave not just autocratically but almost insanely in Cabinet, it can be excused as the first onset of the dementia that has reduced her now to a wreck of herself.

Even more questionably, Law and Morgan have managed to extract a feelgood end from her illness. We are led to believe that having finally said farewell to the hallucination of Denis she is really better, living at last in the present, conveyed not only by the lovely clarities of the Prelude and Fugue in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier but the sudden arrival of the outside world in the form of birdsong. This, I think, is a more irresponsible treatment of dementia than taking the liberty of portraying it while Lady Thatcher is still with us.

Quite a package then, one way and another: pretty much compulsory viewing, I'd say, and not only for Meryl. Those for whom the Iron Lady exists only for the purposes of the Two Minutes Hate will choke on it - but never mind.

The Iron Lady
Cert: 12A