The Iron Lady

Not since 1990’s Reversal of Fortune has a film this weak been rendered this good by a performance this incredible.  Meryl Streep devours the role of the aging Margaret Thatcher with the same fearless conviction yet casualness of craft that had made her the greatest actress of her generation and, in my opinion, the greatest actor in the history of cinema.  As with her lighthearted but stunningly accurate portrayal of Julia Child in 2009’s Julie & Julia, Streep takes a well-known public figure--Britain's controversial, conservative, first female prime minister--and creates both a credible impression and an original character that is far more layered and multi-dimensional than any mere impersonation could be.

As in Julie & Julia, Streep doesn’t even have to speak to seal the deal.  In the opening shot of The Iron Lady, an ancient and half-senile Thatcher is shuffling through a shop to buy milk. As the film began, I thought “that’s Meryl Streep in old age make-up, this is never going to work,” but by the time she had placed the milk on the counter--before even opening her mouth--I had bought into the idea that this was Maggie Thatcher as she is today.  There is something in the way Streep physicalizes the women she plays that makes her become them even when she doesn’t look much like them in reality.  There is an effortless quality to her style of acting that is totally opposite to the actor-studio approach, where we feel the effort an actor is making to externalize the internal and manifest every single aspect of their character.

I stand in awe of Streep’s performance in this role; I just wish the film around her had been worthy of it.  Writer Abi Morgan (who also wrote this year’s Shame) and director Phyllida Lloyd (who directed Streep in 2008’s Mamma Mia) miss the chance to create a film that is more than just a showcase for a great actor.  The film is neither an interesting bio-pic, a credible political movie, a feminist take on history, or a character study about aging and senility.  It could have been any of these (especially a character study--which is what I think it is trying to be).  But the endless scenes between Thatcher and the imagined presence of her late husband (Jim Broadbent) are stagy and tedious and really offer no insight into old age, mental illness or the mind of this fascinating figure.  The flashbacks to her youth and her days in power are reduced to historic highlights, treated like CliffsNotes bullet points.

Thatcher was one of the most powerful and polarizing figures in modern history.  She was Britain's longest serving prime minister--she seemed a permanent figure to me in my youth, when US presidents would come and go but she seemed to always be in power.  Yet this film reduces the issues around her to those that even the most minor politician would face and gives younger audiences no sense of why she was so loved and so hated by so many for so long.

Meryl Streep deservedly won her seventeenth Oscar nomination and third award for this performance, but this film can only be regarded as a major disappointment that squanders the opportunity to showcase both Streep’s work and Thatcher’s legacy.