Our new resident reviewer Holly Smith has been out to the cinema to do the right thing and review The Iron Lady on our behalf. Afterall, we're the publisher who brought you Margaret Thatcher In Her Own Words (and the double-disk CD!). So who else would you trust to review the film?
This is Holly. Look at her lovely trustworthy face.
There’s some people so iconic you can’t imagine them ever being any different than the image history has immortalised them in. Winston Churchill came out of the womb smoking a cigar. Jackie O came out in a Chanel suit. Margaret Thatcher came out with pearls, a handbag and a commitment to the free market.
It’s always odd when someone fills in the gaps from the times when these characters weren’t so iconic, or when their star had faded. Done badly it can go really, really wrong. Done well it can be fantastic. The Iron Lady ends up right in the middle. There’s no denying that Meryl Streep is utterly brilliant as Margaret Thatcher. The voice, the mannerisms, the aura; she’s got it down to a tee.
The film itself is not so perfect. The focus on Lady Thatcher’s dementia is one of many things you may not expect from this film. It started off reasonably enough, showing Thatcher leaving her house unattended to buy a pint of milk. Cue lots of concerned whispering from her household staff. It ended up with the ghost of Denis Thatcher, played by Jim Broadbent, dancing around in a turban. Jim Broadbent gives a fine performance as Denis Thatcher but there’s few things more irritating about the apparent need of films concerning any woman even vaguely impressive to represent husbands as just a little bit silly. The kind of person you laugh at, rather than with.
It’s odd that the young Denis seems much more insightful and ahead of his time in his younger incarnation. Similarly the young Margaret Thatcher comes across as a bit gormless compared to her formidable later years. All those years of political service apparently made Margaret a lot sharper and Denis a lot less so.
The film has managed to feature some of the moments of Thatcher’s career which most horrify her critics, such as the sinking of the Belgrano in the Falklands War, and her insistent belief in the poll tax, but at the same time managed to be sympathetic to Thatcher. Admittedly this has been done by glossing over the actual decision making processes and the intellectual intent behind them but still, it’s quite a feat. Old, frail, alone and living in the grip of a mental illness the Iron Lady is not so steely anymore.
One moment which I wish they hadn’t tampered with was the death of Thatcher’s leadership campaign manager Airey Neave, who was killed by an IRA car bomb. In the film Thatcher is present at his death. In reality Thatcher wasn’t there, but she did speak to the press immediately afterwards, holding her nerve in the face of the death of a close friend. The effect of Airey Neave on Margaret Thatcher’s career shouldn’t be underestimated and there was simply no need to mess with what actually happened.
Before the release of the film Thatcher’s many admirers were understandably concerned about how their hero would be portrayed. Well they may be disappointed with the lack of some of Thatcher’s most iconic moments – the famous speeches, the miners’ strike – but for anyone who’s worried about the film not really getting what Thatcher was all about rest assured, there’s one scene which will convince you. Thatcher’s doctor asks her how she’s feeling. She scolds him for asking how she feels, in place of what she’s thinking. People don’t think anymore, she says. It doesn’t get more Thatcher than that.