This is a true, bravura performance in a film that remains solidly in the middle of the pack.
In this film image provided by The Weinstein Company, Meryl Streep portrays Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady." (AP Photo/The Weinstein Company, Alex Bailey)“The Iron Lady” TWO AND A HALF STARS
Rated: PG-13 for violence and brief nudity
Running time: 105 minutes
The new Margaret Thatcher biopic, “The Iron Lady,” does one thing that woman never did: It asks you to feel sorry for her.
An impressionistic portrait of the former British prime minister (and the herald for an international conservative movement) it spends nearly as much time faithfully observing the woman in her dotage as it does watching her at 10 Downing Street.
And the elderly woman we meet is heading into senility if not outright madness, often unaware of current events, confused about her family members and still talking to – and seeing, and bossing about – the beloved husband who’s been dead for years.
This mental diagnosis may be overdramatic – although Thatcher is 86, and in poor health – but it’s also beside the point. And it’s unfair, not just to the woman but her critics.
Set any movie about a controversial leader deep in their advancing decrepitude, and you’re going to garner cheap sympathy. And that’s not what Thatcher herself would want – or her still very vocal opponents, in England and abroad, demand.
What “The Iron Lady” does contain – what makes it worth watching – is a literally amazing performance by Meryl Streep, who also understands that Thatcher herself was a performance.
Because Thatcher developed those commanding airs to stand up to the men who constantly demanded she sit down. She put on that overly patrician voice to try to distance herself from her humble beginnings as the daughter of a small-town grocer.
But she never could. Because his beliefs – down with taxes and unions, up with free markets and the military – were his own, before they became her own. And they remain conservative tenets today.
Are they – was she – right or wrong? That’s another debate. And one this movie seems not just uninterested in, but unaware of.
It shows the violent domestic opposition to Thatcher, but not what they were opposing. Her government’s international record (against the Irish hunger strikers and a reunified Germany, in favor of the Khmer Rouge and apartheid South Africa) is barely touched upon.
Instead director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan concentrate on the historic, feminist angle – although the real Thatcher probably would object to that even more than the plea for pity. And the film doesn’t play fair there, either (Golda Meir came first, and there were other women in British politics – although you won’t see them here).
So putting aside the film’s attention to history (wandering) and interest in complexity (slight), what do you have?
Well, you have a sturdy, if somewhat predictable, tale of a middle-class striver triumphing over sexism and classism – only, ironically, to become a bit of a bully and a terrible snob. And you have several good supporting actors, including the always-welcome Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher, a spouse so long-suffering he could be a Kennedy wife.
And you have Streep.
“It’s a wonderful impersonation,” a critic said to me as we left the screening, and I noted the choice of words, and the old charge against Streep – it’s all technique, no feeling. But this is more than mere mimicry. This is a true, bravura performance – one of the best of the year in, sadly, a film that remains solidly in the middle of the pack.