Iron Lady: Great Performance But Not Great Film

Meryl Streep's performance as Margaret Thatcher is awesome to behold. (When is Streep less than magnificent?) But "The Iron Lady" has some problems as a film. It's not bad, but it isn't great.

The movie, directed by Phyllida Lloyd ("Mamma Mia"), spends entirely too much time in the present day, following the senile Thatcher around her apartment as she putters, looks through memorabilia, and hallucinates that her dead husband is still living with her. (The eighty-something Thatcher is still alive but rarely appears in public.) These sequences are affecting in the beautiful, mournful opening to the film. But over and over again, Lloyd interrupts the dramatic action of the film to bring us back to the disoriented old lady ambling around the house.

It's hard to understand what Lloyd found so fascinating about this footage. My companions and I agreed that the far more interesting sequences were of the young Thatcher struggling to overcome class and gender discrimination to rise to power in England. If Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan (who, incidentally, also co-wrote another film in current release, "Shame," starring Michael Fassbender) had focused in more on Thatcher's youth and heyday as Prime Minister, "The Iron Lady" would have been vastly more engaging.

As it stands, "The Iron Lady" is quite superficial. At times one senses an almost ghoulish desire on the part of the creative team to denigrate the arch-conservative Thatcher. She was ultra-tough in her attacks on the British Left in the 1980s, but now she's demented and alone. No one loves her. Was Lloyd happy to depict the arch-nemesis of the Left as a woman with little to no family or friends? If so, I find this disgraceful and not the work of an artist. Even though I disagree with many of Thatcher's policies, I find her an immensely interesting figure -- far more significant than the rather shallow Phyllida Lloyd.


The most thought-provoking line from the movie shows the elderly Thatcher expressing her disappointment with the 21st century: "It used to be about trying to do something; now it's all about trying to be someone."