The Iron Lady

If you were to judge The Iron Lady simply on its star performance by Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, the controversial U.K. Prime Minister who held power from 1979 to 1990, you would probably be looking at one of the best films of the year. It's no surprise that Streep's performance is amazing here, but what really captivated me is how complete the transformation is. I never once felt like I was watching a celebrity playing a famous figure, she is that convincing. Not only is it accurate, but its incredibly moving at times as well. It's definitely one to remember in her long line of acting achievements.

Too bad the movie the performance inhabits is almost a total mess. As a bio-picture of Thatcher, you probably couldn't even get any sloppier or historically disjointed, and you would probably end up learning more about her by reading the Wikipedia page about her. The screenplay by Abi Morgan is completely disorganized, jumping from one crucial moment to the next, with nothing in between. Also annoying is the film's narrative. A majority of the film is set two decades after her time in power, with Thatcher as a doddering old recluse, senile and suffering from constant hallucinations of her long-departed husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent). The movie will then flash back to an important moment in Thatcher's life or political career, which naturally grabs our attention, only to have the movie pretty much skim over all the major details, and just give us a bare bones recreation of her career. We don't learn about the people in Thatcher's life or career, nor do we discover anything about why she made the decisions she did. The movie's too preoccupied with having Thatcher hanging out with the ghost of her dead husband.

Such important events that The Iron Lady decides to completely gloss over include the Falklands War (which is pretty much covered in a montage), and a bombing attempt on her life while she was staying in a hotel with her husband. These things simply happen, and then the movie moves on, expecting us to fill in the blanks. We don't even really get to know the people who influenced her, or were part of her life. This is surprising, since the movie spends so much time with the elderly Thatcher having visits from her dead husband, while the flashbacks never really tell us anything about them in the first place. We never learn why their love was so strong for each other, or even why they really seemed to fall in love with each other in the first place. This is an obnoxious screenplay, where obviously no real research has been done. It simply gives us the "Greatest Hits" of the woman's life, and thinks we know what it's talking about, so it doesn't have to explain any further.

The flashback narrative that the filmmakers have used also gives the movie an annoying "stop and go" quality. Just when we're getting involved in the story, such as when it depicts a young Thatcher (played by Alexandra Roach) forcing her way into a male-dominated political system, it goes right back to the modern day scenes with Thatcher as an elderly recluse, and the entire momentum of the film simply just stops dead. The movie is constantly teasing us with intriguing details of her life, only to just give us either the bare essentials, or nothing at all. At one point, the movie talks about political relationship with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, but all we get to see of this is a brief glimpse of the two dancing together at some kind of political ball. The movie's disjointed narrative ensures that nobody gets developed, sometimes not even Thatcher herself. We are watching some great performances up on the screen (everyone here is great, but lack the transformative quality of Streep's performance), but the acting has no role to inhabit.

I'm hard pressed to remember the last time a film about an important historical figure simply glossed over every single detail the way The Iron Lady does. It criminally wastes the wonderful talent the screenplay somehow managed to attract, and by doing so, it only ends up wasting the time of its audience. This is a D-Level screenplay that lucked out and managed to rope in an A-Level cast and production. I guess that averages out to being a C-Level movie.

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