Thatcher: Still dividing opinion
Meryl Streep is superb as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady - but the film itself is less impressive
Controversy abounds with director Phyllida Lloyd's new biopic of Margaret Thatcher.
On the one hand, Conservative critics, including the current Prime Minister, decry the insensitivity of portraying a frail elderly woman's decline while she is still alive. On the other, those of a liberal persuasion accuse the film of sentimentalising one of the most divisive political figures of modern times.
So what do the critics agree upon? Well, common to them all is admiration and praise for Meryl Streep's performance as the ailing former Prime Minister.
Not only is Streep a passable physical match for Thatcher (enhanced by some cunning hair and make-up), but her recreation of Lady Thatcher's many mannerisms, including that unmistakable voice, is nothing short of uncanny.
It has the feel of a flawless, unstoppable performance, and has been justly lauded as one of Streep's best.
Nonetheless, there is a feeling that Streep is all dressed up with no-where to go, her pitch-perfect impersonation trapped within an uninspired biopic framework that uses events of the present to elucidate those of the past.
A terrorist attack in South-Asia triggers memories of the IRA's bombing of the Grand Hotel in 1984, and there follows a rather brusque whistle-stop tour of Thatcher's ‘greatest hits': her arrival in the Commons, the 1979 Tory victory, confrontation with the trade unions, the Falklands War, and her inevitable fall from power (with Richard E Grant as the hawkish Michael Heseltine, complete with cobra-hood haircut).
For many, these are the defining political events of a generation, and yet Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan offer little of themselves in their portrayal – no opinion, or even an implied opinion, of their subject's actions.
The Iron Lady's Thatcher is neither good nor bad, but merely a fact, treated with a political disinterestedness that proves a constant frustration.
It is this non-committal treatment of the subject that has, I think, so incensed critics on both sides of the political spectrum.
This depoliticised, delibidinised Thatcher leaves the audience with very little insight into the woman herself, as we are invited to admire her on the (I think rather feeble) grounds that she is more forceful than the men. There are flashes of her fangs (there's a marvellous scene in which she launches into an unprovoked lecture on the importance of ideas over ‘feelings', and another in which she cruelly hectors Geoffrey Howe), and at these moments The Iron Lady feels like it may creak into life.
Sadly though, these incidents are all too fleeting. Put simply, Phyllida Lloyd doesn't seem to know what she wants to say about Lady Thatcher's life and career. When it comes to this most controversial of political figures, she may be the only person in Britain without an opinion.
Rating:***
