‘Iron Lady’

Meryl Streep is guaranteed her 17^th Academy Award nomination for her bravura performance in ‘The Iron Lady’ — if only the movie was as good.

Streep’s uncanny portrayal of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is impressive, if not expected, from the versatile actress. However, it is often the only watchable aspect of a movie so afraid of stirring the pot. The overall outcome feels insultingly apathetic.

The movie’s lack of opinion about Thatcher is one of its most frustrating aspects, only because Thatcher herself was a controversial leader. During her tenure, she was celebrated by the ideological right, thoroughly despised by leftists and held responsible for the social unrest throughout Britain in the 1980s. All of the debate surrounding her leadership is fertile ground for a potentially thoughtful portrait of one of the most prominent figures of the 20th century.

Instead, ‘The Iron Lady’ wastes most of its time depicting Thatcher in the later years of her retirement, prohibited from leaving the house and suffering from hallucinations of her late husband. What must have sounded good on paper ultimately works as a shoddy framing device, with Thatcher reflecting on her life in the early stages of dementia.

Though the focus on an elderly Thatcher might evoke a more vulnerable depiction than the title suggests, it draws too much attention away from integral — and arguably more interesting — parts of her life and career. The film dwells excessively on her frailty and dependency late in her life, more concerned with showing her competency at washing a teacup than her capability of running a country.

And yet the moments spent on Thatcher’s career seem too disjointed, playing more like a montage of Wikipedia’s best highlights than an analysis of a complex, potentially misunderstood political figure. The approach is annoyingly formulaic,featuring a thoughtful, reminiscent expression from Streep before cutting to a flashback that feels like a page torn from a history textbook. The movie rarely offers context behind these vignettes, which makes many of her career motives seem purposeless.

These shortcomings should be attributed to director Phyllida Lloyd (‘Mamma Mia!’), who demeans both this biopic and Thatcher’s legacy to a series of snapshots and pseudo-psychoanalytical moments. Her almost thoughtless look into Thatcher’s decline into dementia is particularly disturbing in its desire to make a tragedy out of the former prime minister’s life rather than saying anything remarkable or thoughtful about it.

Streep is mercifully excellent as Thatcher in a performance that coaxes subtlety and sympathy from a movie seemingly unconcerned with both. Whereas the script would have any other actress floundering to capture Thatcher’s cold yet grandiose demeanor, Streep slips into Thatcher effortlessly. She delivers an accurate impersonation of the steely former leader, one further enriched with surprising shades of humanity.

Unfortunately for ‘The Iron Lady,’ Streep is the film’s only ace in the hole. It milks her for all she’s worth, using multiple close-ups and drawn-out monologues that would work well to showcase her performance come Oscar night. But the dependence upon her performance renders everything else around her disappointingly hollow. Every other character is either underdeveloped or uninteresting, including Jim Broadbent as Thatcher’s supportive late husband, Denis. When the movie ends with old Margaret begging him to come back to her, you never really understand what she needed from him in the first place.

With Lloyd’s direction, ‘The Iron Lady’ insists on plowing through historic highlights at the expense of lacking a coherent narrative. Even worse, it fails to properly depict or understand Margaret Thatcher, a woman deserving of the respect and intellect that this movie so desperately lacks.

dataroy@syr.edu

Published on January 18, 2012 at 12:00 pm