Streep arrives on stage as a vulnerable, forgotten, tottering Thatcher; a shrunken 80-year-old figure who immediately inspires the audience to feel protective of her.
How good is Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady? Streep, as the frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Actress, has been called the redeeming feature of this largely plodding and sentimental film. But what does her performance say about the film, as well as the controversial figure of Margaret Thatcher herself?
Streep, in her usual style, engrosses herself completely in the character — Britain’s longest-seated Prime Minister — that she makes it too easy to forgive the historical blemishes of a very flawed political character. Streep arrives on stage as a vulnerable, forgotten, tottering Thatcher; a shrunken 80-year-old figure who immediately inspires the audience to feel protective of her. Wearing a scarf and queuing for milk at a grocery shop, no one recognises Thatcher. When she returns to her residence, her caretakers are palpably shaken that she “got away”.
Thatcher pokes sly fun at her caretakers with her husband, Denis Thatcher, a man in many ways shown to be the core of Thatcher’s existence. But the problem is that Denis died many years ago, and Thatcher keeps chattering company with a ghostly delusion. Thatcher’s dementia supposedly plagued her for years in reality.
It is 2008, and Mumbai’s 26/11 is splashed over all the newspapers that Thatcher peers at in the grocery shop. At this point the story slips back in time as Thatcher recollects the IRA assassination attempt, as well as the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984.
The film is a slapdash of events: it seems to go through events just to be over with them. The Falklands War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, a waltz with conservative comrade Ronald Reagan: there is an over-reliance on montages that takes away from the film’s impact.
Back in the present, Thatcher reaches home and begins to pack her deceased husband’s belongings. Memories of their tender courtship mix with her political memories — real, imagined and confused — as well as archival footage of British unrest. At the end of the film, Thatcher summons her famous ‘will’ to banish the ghost of her dead husband. It is a scene of cloying sentimentality; if only it was so easy to defeat dementia in real life.
Streep is indeed the saving grace of the film. She plays both the doddering old woman beset by dementia, and the most powerful woman in the world at her absolute height, with complete authority. There is no Americanism allowed to slip through: the imperious gestures, the annoying ‘upper-class’ voice, and the perfectly coiffed presence are spot on.
Nominated for:
Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Best achievement in makeup
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