The Iron Lady (0/10)

January 22nd, 2012

When Meryl Streep goes up to collect her Oscar for her impersonation of Margaret Thatcher listen very carefully. You just might hear a little sigh from the heavens as the spirit of Janet Brown exhales deeply and muses ‘that could have been me.’ Streep nails Mrs Thatch perfectly, the best ever in fact, and that’s why she’s a good actress. Whether winning acting awards for impersonations is fair or not is something I’ll leave you to ponder. Oh, as for The Iron Lady? What a steaming pile of crap it is.

Just what sort of film were the makers aiming for? It’s certainly not a biopic, with huge great chunks of Mrs Thatch’s life either skimped over or simply omitted. She hid under a table in wartime (drat - so close), she got married to a perfectly sober, barely-touched-a-drop Denis young, had two kids, swore not to be the type of woman to die washing a teacup, became an MP, survived a bomb blast (double drat) that killed her friend Airey Neave instead (and, The Iron Lady insists, was an inspiration for her running for party leader whereas the bombing actually happened after she became the big cheese), had a bit of a skirmish with the unions and the IRA and got re-elected after kicking some Argie ass from five thousand miles away. Actually, writing it down like that sounds like a lot. The movie, though, flies by such events with breathtaking haste. Whole swathes of information are ignored, leaving those that remain to be summarily dismissed in much the same way as Thatch dismissed entire mining communities.

No, it is not a biopic. It might be a supernatural thriller. Denis haunts old Thatch, yes he does, despite being dead for years. Here’s our once-great woman, now in the grip of dementia, talking to her dead husband, the pair discussing their memories in a sweet and loving way. It gets nasty. ‘Be orff with you’, she might have screamed, so fed up of his music hall jokes, but Denis isn’t going anywhere. Director Phyllida Lloyd, a limited movie director if ever there was one, suddenly employs rapid zooms, dangerous shadows and half-filled frames to suggest that Denis is on his way back from the grave to do who knows what to our doddery former battleaxe. You can relax, though. For the most part he remains benign, unless you regard his buffoonery as potentially lethal.

Perhaps it’s a study of dementia. The majority of the movie has Thatch (Streep) pottering about, buying her own milk from the corner shop (yeah, right), gazing wistfully out the window, failing to recognise herself on the telly, and getting rather confused about everything. Should we feel sorry for her? You’ve got a more forgiving heart than mine if you’re able to. Ah, but the more dynamic Thatch, that was the real deal. Her ‘special relationship’ with that other senile goat Reagan, combined with the adoption of Milton Friedman’s impact politics – the first shock and awe tactic, if you like – now that’s the Thatch at her imperious, fuck-you best. She was as mad then as she is now. 'To Hell with us, and to Hell with our children', Dennis sighs with exasperation at her announcement to run for party leader. He might have added 'and to Hell with Northerners, miners, trade union members and NHS users' while he was at it.

Maybe it's a parody, a satire perhaps. After all, it's impossible to 'do' Thatch without nudge-nudge, wink-winking. The idea of her standing at one of those strategic maps, moving ships around as she plots the Argentinian downfall, can only be regarded as tongue in cheek surely. How else can we explain the doddery old lady waltzing round her living room with her dead husband? Whether intended or not, The Iron Lady is pretty funny, never more so than in Thatch's descent into megalomania post-Falklands. Remarkably, even the Tories saw that enough was enough and dumped her.

It's difficult to know who The Iron Lady is going to appeal to. Not Thatch acolytes, for sure, who will object to the ricketty old woman teeter-tottering across our screen with a head full of jumbled memories, and not for viewers interested in facts or rationales; Lloyd and company share no insight in what made Thatch tick and have a laissez-faire attitude towards the events of the age. Thatch critics - including me, could you have guessed? - won't feel inclined to lend a sympathetic ear even after all these years, and least of all Thatch herself, who should be outraged in her unseemly presentation. The old girl's not dead in the ground yet, but here's an obituary that has its emphasis squarely at her post-government years when, to put it mildly, she was not at her most compos mentis.

I’ve got a pitch. ‘How they Made Charade’, starring Alistair McGowan and Ronni Ancona. Why go for one acting Oscar when you can bag two? Make it, Channel 4, and be sure to include Jim Broadbent. If you don’t know the story, just make stuff up based on what you can remember. It doesn’t matter. People will flock to see famous people portrayed with uncanny likenesses on screen. That’s the only reason to watch The Iron Lady, and it’s a pretty flimsy one. No, I tell a lie; there are two reasons. Remember earlier I mentioned Thatch’s desire to not be the kind of woman to dies while cleaning a teacup? Have a guess what the final scene is. I felt a little tingle inside me at the thought of it.