Review: The Iron Lady (12A)

Published on Thursday 5 January 2012 00:00

She’s a fascinating, divisive and hugely important political figure, yet Margaret Thatcher’s life and career has been reduced to glib cliché in this ill-judged, awful biopic. Review by Alistair Harkness

ONLY a few days old and already 2012 has served up what is likely to remain one of the worst films of the year. Mamma Mia! director Phyllida Lloyd’s catastrophically ill-judged film about Margaret Thatcher arrives on a wave of hype but reveals itself to be little more than a facile, fallacious, by-the-numbers biopic that transforms the life of one of the most politically important, divisive and controversial figures of the 20th century into a grotesque, puffed-up star-vehicle for Meryl Streep.

Jettisoning any meaningful attempt to explore Thatcher’s life and work with strong drama, subtle writing, complex characterization, or even scalpel sharp satire, it’s an apolitical, context-free, pop video mash-up of hoary biopic clichés, Stars in Your Eyes-style cameos (see Richard E Grant’s odd-looking Michael Heseltine or Olivia Colman’s Elmur Fudd-like take on Carol Thatcher), fact-filleting narrative jumps and budget-saving archival montages.

Kicking off with Thatcher (Streep) in her dotage, its most contentious creative leap is to tell the story in flashback, framed with multiple scenes of the former Prime Minister wandering around her Belgravia town house, half-senile, chatting to the ghost of deceased husband Denis (Jim Broadbent) as she clears out his things. In interviews Lloyd has rather fancifully compared this approach to King Lear. Sadly the end result isn’t Shakespeare, although it is tragic – and for all the wrong reasons, not least of which is the sense of missed opportunity that it leaves you with.

Regardless of what political stripes you wear, there’s no denying Thatcher was an extraordinary and fascinating woman who helped define for better or worse a crucial period in the development of the world, the aftereffects of which are still being felt today. Yet the film succeeds only in smoothing over every strength and weakness, achievement and failure, reducing her instead to a series of simplistic, half-baked psychoanalytical clichés that end up betraying even the film’s own shallow conception of her as a proto-feminist grocer’s daughter whose laser-sharp focus and belief in devoting her life to doing something more than raising a family drove her to the top. Depressingly it is on her failings as a wife and a mother that the film chooses to focus, with her tumultuous political reign becoming mere fodder for an insultingly idiotic portrait of her as a lonely old woman whose life is tinged with regret as she comes to the realisation that her ambition might have kept everybody at a distance.

Consequently huge, important swathes of British social history are reduced to meaningless montages. The Falklands War is dispensed with in under seven minutes while the IRA bombing campaigns in London, the Poll Tax riots, even the bitterly and brutally fought miners strikes, become little more than footnotes, conflated details thrown together and interspersed with shots of the elderly Thatcher having a restless night’s sleep. And when the visual montages stop, the audio montages start, as Thatcher’s head is filled with a series of beyond-the-grave voices – her father, her husband, her murdered friend and advisor Airey Neave – offering Yoda-like inspiration every time she has a tough decision to make.

It’s biopic filmmaking 101, the umpteenth diluted version of Citizen Kane, but the sort of movie that completely misunderstands the brilliance of that film by making practically every scene a Rosebud moment. Indeed the entire point of building the film around the sight of a once powerful woman cleaning out her closet appears to have been to provide Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame, The Hour) with an easy way of triggering Proustian flashbacks to what they clearly believe are the key moments in her life, which – and this is perhaps befitting the director of an Abba musical – include three references to The King and I, but not one mention of Arthur Scargill.

As for Streep – ignore the well-orchestrated Oscar hype. Like that other Hollywood titan Robert De Niro, she’s just as capable of using her bag of ticks and tricks to deliver a terrible performance and her exalted reputation certainly shouldn’t give her a pass. So while she has the accent down, and some of the mannerisms too, ultimately it doesn’t mean much. Aside from the occasional moment when she manages to hint at something deeper, it’s karaoke acting of the worst kind. The flashback scenes to Thatcher’s political heyday, for instance, are full of glib grandstanding. The present day scenes are even worse, with the heaviness of her prosthetics combining with Streep’s shallow portrait of dementia to give her the bobble-headed appearance of a malfunctioning automaton.

It’s ghoulish, tacky stuff, accentuated by Lloyd’s graceless visual style, which relies on woozy camera work, odd-angled close-ups, jump cuts and slow-motion reaction shots to bring some flailing dynamism to a subject that all involved have succeeded in making a bore. What a spectacular waste of time.

RATING: *

Related Articles

• Film review: Mamma Mia!

  MAMMA MIA! (PG) *

  0 Comments

• Oscars Special: For Your Consideration …

  SINCE THIS YEAR'S OSCAR NOMInations were announced, dedicated fans of The Dark Knight have been attempting to whip up a grassroots campaign to boycott the broadcast of tomorrow's ceremony.

  0 Comments

• Meryl Streep tipped to play Thatcher in biopic

  HOLLYWOOD star Meryl Streep is in discussions to play Baroness Thatcher in a new film.

  0 Comments

Comments

There are 1 comments to this article

Order by:

• Newest first
• |
• Oldest first

Page 1 of 1

• 1
• Show all

1

bdj

Friday, January 6, 2012 at 11:04 AM

...apart from all that it was really good!

• Report Unsuitable

Order by:

• Newest first
• |
• Oldest first

Page 1 of 1

• 1
• Show all

Logged in as:

Comment here. Start typing your comment here:

Post comment

Please adhere to our Community guidelines

Your view

Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.