Margaret Thatcher Deserves Better
WASHINGTON – This film is dreadful.
If the trailer above was actually representative of the final product you would have had something worthy of the woman who ruled Great Britain with an iron will. However, the trailer is not the journey you take with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady.
That the film actually disrespects and marginalizes a woman as large as Margaret Thatcher is movie making malpractice.
Peter Travers is his review long before the film broke, elevates the premise of it to “a kind of female spin on King Lear” and is seduced by this torturous view of Thatcher from the world of dementia.
But why anyone would take the subject of Margaret Thatcher and reduce the drama by putting the lens inside her brain as she declines into this state is beyond me, especially since the way it’s done dwarfs her life, which was of major significance.
Conservatives would be right in encouraging their readers, audiences and talk radio listeners to stay far away from this travesty. People like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and others have the power to make an impact if they do.
It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers and producers would think people would jump to see Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and I’m not surprised in the least she won the Golden Globe for her performance. Playing the role of Margaret Thatcher is an actor’s dream, but delivering a performance of someone of Thatcher’s stature in the throes of dementia is the ultimate test of the actor’s actual craft.
However, it’s unfathomable that anyone could read the initial screenplay and decide to accept the premise, especially given the richness of the woman’s life that could have been mined to great dramatic impact and historic relevance.
Meryl Streep is truly at her best as the aging Thatcher, made possible through the wondrous makeup artistry of Marese Langan. It’s just too bad Streep is stuck in a film that offers no hope of her soaring, regardless of Streep’s herculean talents, which seem boxed in by the dryness of the vision. It’s hard not to pity poor Jim Broadbent, as her husband hallucination Denis Thatcher, who is reduced to a comic distraction and annoyance, though through no fault of his own.
Director Phyllida Lloyd, who also did Mama Mia with Streep, fumbles her way through the film with Abi Morgan’s screenplay not worthy of its subject or that actors’ performances. I’ll wait for any film directed by Lloyd to come to cable from now on.
Margaret Thatcher was a larger than life figure when she was in British politics, a historic leader, but when you consider her gender, not to mention her philosophy and leadership style and choices, her arrival on the world stage was important. What she did and the politics she employed were groundbreaking and horrifying, especially to a liberal like myself, her embrace of austerity and personal coldness to the plights of people worthy of dissection and depiction.
That this film comes in 2012, as economic austerity hits Europe, offers huge opportunities and Ms. Streep’s performance teases what might have been.
A controversial conservative giant, Margaret Thatcher seen through her decline and reminiscences is a legitimate choice, but the fact that the telling through this lens turns sour as you watch and leaves the viewer with only a paltry sense of who Mrs. Thatcher was in history is why this film not only falls flat, but is a cheap imitation to what is required when the subject is so large.
That Iron Lady needed to be sold through a trailer like the one above is simple. No matter how brilliant Streep’s performance, and it’s all that, a representative clip showing the majority of the film with Margaret Thatcher fighting dementia would have turned off audiences in droves and for very good reasons.
Taylor Marsh is the author of the new e-book, The Hillary Effect – Politics, Sexism and the Destiny of Loss, which is now available in print on Amazon. Marsh is a veteran political analyst and commentator. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her new media blog.
8 Responses to “Margaret Thatcher Deserves Better”
Oh man, I am sorry to hear that Taylor. I’d hoped it would be a great film about a highly unusual woman.
-I learned something valuable from Shaun Mullen when Tammy Faye Baker died. I wrote an obit for her and ran a clip of her interview with Larry King just a couple days before her death. She was so gaunt, truly her cheeks were in furbelows, and the suffering of her body was clear. Shaun also wrote about Tammy Faye’s passing, and the image he chose was Tammy Faye at her prime, a beautiful, clear eyed woman. And, I was moved by his choice, in part bec I’d never seen the pix of her seeming pre jBaker, and partly because the picture he chose radiated vibrant life force. (he’s very good at choosing pix in general too).
What I learned was this: that one way of honoring that people are so very ill, is also to note their illness as only one picture in an album of millions of moments in their lives, especially when they have accomplished so very much as say Mandela (still living but so very frail) in Invictus, or CS Lewis’s life (great movie by the way and profound and sensitive treatment, I thought, of the death of his chosen one and his terrible grief) and others, each in their own ways.
I am sorry to hear Taylor that the movie is somehow tilted. I had hoped it would be a great movie showing insight into her life and especially her ways of thinking and deciding various matters that affected so many, including going to war.
I do remember that many of us thought MT was arid in certain ways, and not noting care of ‘the least of the least’ but also, many of us thought it was a miracle that a woman was elected in Britain. Too, we cringed as she went through what Hillary and others before and after [Woodhull, Feraro, Palin, Bachman, Thomas, Stanton, Barton, Adams] went through with regard to attacks on prominent women for not being womanly enough, or being too barbie, or being women in drag, or not being pleasing enough to a man’s eye as though wanting to judge women by whether they made the main mast stiff or not, or being ‘too exciting’ to a man’s watchful zipper, or or. It was and is very strange and base public response that not even monkeys make in creating their own pecking orders.
Thank you for your points, Taylor… I would like to see the movie and perhaps can draw inferences from it about MT’s life… maybe. Queen Elizabeth also, as opposed to her own mother, had that dry lonliness too, I think. It seems if one climbs high enough in politics or royalty, one’s own hair can grow into one’s throne, trapping a person in a brittle response to life. Perhaps for MT as for Qe, more
moisture to the viewpoints so to speak, rather than leaving all thought, ideation, impulse so austere.
I was planning on seeing this until the horrible reviews started coming in. I know one should be wary of critics, but this certainly seemed a movie INTENDED for critics, and it apparently falls flat.
Maybe I’ll stream it sometime in the future …
to dr. e- The trailer teases exactly what you (and I) were hoping and expecting to get from a movie on Margaret Thatcher, but what she earned. I cannot tell you how different the movie is from its marketing. I so agree that the cruel reality of her illness could have been a point, instead of the entire point of view of the film.
Barky – I can’t recommend this movie for any reason. Not even Streep’s performance is worth sitting through this movie making disaster.
Last night in her acceptance speech, Streep said, We made this for 25 cents in 5 minutes.
It says it all. Weinstein & company had little to no respect for what this subject required and obviously didn’t care.
I’ll probably see it anyway since I don’t trust critics’ views much anymore. They often don’t tally with my enjoyment of a film.
Ms. Streep is worth watching even in a real bomb, though I might agree with the critics about the film later on.
To nitpick a bit, Ms. Thatcher was not a groundbreaker except in Britain. Golda Meier and Indira Gandhi preceded her and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, prime minister of Sri Lanka,preceded them.
http://www.squidoo.com/women-presidents-women-prime-ministers
Ohio, it’s ok, that’s not a nitpick in my book, that’s info. Thanks. I think of the women you mention as being from Asia and the Mideast. To me it is very different system in which they came to be top person. I was just thinking of ‘western systems’ for the moment (USA and England). But you are right
I had a wildly different take on this film. I saw it as a story of marginalization in the modern world — first due to gender, then due to age and mental disability. I thought as such that the subject matter was treated with a great deal of respect. I thought it presented the controversy of her positions well, in addition to the controversy and defiance of being a woman in her position.
The critics have been panning it, but that doesn’t mean that at least you shouldn’t try to see it. What good, often, are critics?
Streep is one of what, two? (Streep, Hanks) who can act and for that reason alone it is proabably worth viewing (at least one critic has said that she gives people an acting clinic).
Hopefully she does some honor and justice to a great political and reform figure.
I was never a fan of Thatcher or her politics but I have to agree 100% with Taylor about the movie. Streep was impressive in the role, but the film was an uninspiring mess. It never probed into the rationale for Thatcher’s conservative views, and spent far too much time showing MT in her later years as a mentally diminished, confused woman. I found that I also was a confused woman as I tried to follow the poorly connected flashbacks.
Its a shame that Ms. Streep’s considerable talents were wasted, as was an opportunity to enlighten us about a significant historical figure. As bad as the film was, I think I would have had to ask for a refund if someone else had played the title role, because Streep’s performance was the movie’s only saving grace.