The Iron Lady (2012)
A look at the life of Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, with a focus on the price she paid for power.
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"Thatcher: The Frail Years" seems both exploitative, and undeservedly sentimental...It's not that it doesn't cover the bad stuff - but the fact that it takes the form of an elderly lady experiencing a long dark night of the soul affords her a distance from her most famous battles that is entirely unwarranted.She suffered... and maybe what goes around comes around - but other people are still suffering from the effects of her policies, and they don't all get a movie of their own.It's all a bit shallow, and smacks of (very fine) actors playing dress- up, instead of the immersive experience it could and SHOULD have been.
Meryl Streep, who never met a moderate or conservative she didn't hate, must have agreed to make this movie after reading a script that was an obvious hit-job on Margaret Thatcher.For those of you who don't know, Thatcher was the first female Prime Minister of the UK. She was also a key figure (along with her friend Ronald Reagan) in exposing the realities behind the Marxist paradise known as the USSR.This movie is not a biography. It is propaganda from Hollywood. When Hollywood makes a biopic on Dan Rather or Bill Ayers (both films starring Robert Redford) they turn partisan radicals into . . . into . . .well, they turn them into Robert Redford, a handsome leading man with charisma and the love of the public.When they make a movie about one of the 20th Centuries most important leaders who changed the world for the better, they cast someone who can't separate their anti-American politics from their work.Thatcher deserves a sincere and thorough biopic for the sake of posterity. This is anything but.
After reading the reviews I started watching this without much hope. It was however definitely more interesting than I thought it would be, but it was not primarily about the iron lady, Margaret Thatcher. It was instead a study of advancing dementia, and could have been about any old woman of 84, two years before her death. Hanging the details on someone who had led a life of distinction was really no more than a marketing ploy. After age 80 no-one, whatever or whoever they might have been, has much to look forward to, although they would have a lot to look back on. They would do better to find something other than an obsession with the past to occupy their thoughts. The film's title is a misnomer, since what it shows is not in any sense a narrative of Thatcher's actual life, and it is small wonder that most viewers feel deceived and cheated. However, a film titled Senility and Dementia would hardly attract much of an audience. It's a melancholy warning to anyone living beyond the age of 80, and here I include myself. In other respects it's a noteworthy impersonation by Streep.
This film is told from the perspective of Thatcher when she was a doddering, senile old woman. This would work if used as a starting point, but as the film grinds on, you eventually realize that THAT is all the movie is about: Margaret Thatcher as a senile old woman remembering, in fits and starts, various disjointed and isolated memories of her time as Britain's first female prime minister.The director and writer made no attempt to provide any insight into how Thatcher actually made any of her decisions. Also missing was any sense of how the events she attempted to shape actually came to be or, in many cases, any description of what those events really were. As one example, the Falklands conflict just pops up in one scene, with no prologue or explanation. Then, in the next scene, without any explanation, she decides to fight a war.As another example, bombs go off at various points in the movie, without any explanation. Even more inexplicably, after her residence is bombed, there are no subsequent scenes that follow up on this dramatic and troubling scene.The entire film is like this, with each scene having nothing much to do with anything that has come before. In a word, this film is haphazard.Having watched this movie, I know nothing more about Margaret Thatcher; nothing whatsoever about the British conservative movement of the 1980s; and nothing about how Thatcher changed Britain and the world.This is a movie that is about one thing: Meryl Streep's incredible impersonation of Thatcher. It is nothing more than that: there is no plot; no beginning, middle, or end; no characters that anyone could possibly care about; and no explanation whatsoever for anything the main character says or does.When the credits thankfully finally appeared, I cursed the director and writer of this movie for wasting my time, wasting the talents of a great actress, and for totally failing to tell us anything about one of the most remarkable and important leaders of the 20th century.Skip this movie: you will miss nothing.