It was refreshing, though ultimately problematic, that Phyllida Law’s “The Iron Lady” refused to follow the straight biopic trajectory to tell the story of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Although remnants of her career are told in flashbacks, these have a different flavor than those we saw in Eastwood’s “J. Edgar”: they don’t all piece together in a straightforward story from start to finish. Instead, they are reminiscences of an icy woman gone mad. And therein lies the problem with the film: Law and screenwriter Abi Morgan are so busy editorializing about Thatcher’s career and life that they leave no room for the audience to make up our own minds, to consider the controversy of Thatcher’s career without being told what to think. Worse, the editorializing often comes in platitudinous remarks, like when Thatcher’s colleague tells her “if you want to change this country, you need to lead this country.”
In the present, where we first meet Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep in her Golden Globe-winning performance), she is mad and alone, hallucinating about her dead husband and nostalgic for her glory years as prime minister. Her extreme ambition in her political career led her to alienate everyone in her life, from her children that she never had time for to her colleagues whom she frequently berated without restraint. Of course, Streep nails her tics and affectations and gives us a glimpse at the three-dimensional character that the film dances around but never fully explores.
Read the rest at the Stanford Daily.
