Movie Review - The Iron Lady
This is the most frustrating movie I've seen in a long time. Someone managed to assemble all the right people together in a melting pot of excellence, and then made the wrong bloody film!
Yes, Meryl Streep is truly excellent. The make-up, the voice, the posture, the mannerisms - she captures Margaret Thatcher astonishingly well. The film really is worth seeing for her performance alone. It's not like she's completely buried under latex either; it's obviously Meryl Streep, but also obviously Mrs. T. Yes, the make-up team deserve a lot of credit, as does her voice coach (assuming she had one - if not, well, it's even more impressive), but most of it deservedly goes to Streep.
The rest of the cast are fantastic, including Jim Broadbent as Dennis Thatcher (who I thought wouldn't fit the role at all, but does), Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe, Richard E. Grant as Michael Heseltine, and many others. The locations and sets are also all top-notch. All the parts are there.
With all that brilliant talent in place, they went and made a film that seems to be mostly about this poor old lady who has Alzheimers, struggling to get over the death of her husband, and trying to keep track of her kids, who just happened to be one of the most powerful people in the world for more than a decade.
I've got nothing against sensitive films about the ravages of age and the heartbreak it can cause. That's an intense part of being human which deserves to be explored. It's just that, if you're making a movie about Margaret Thatcher, it's probably the least interesting story you could tell about her.
Oh, there are plenty of flashbacks to her formative years as a child, as a student and Young Conservative, becoming an MP, and all the ups and downs of being PM, but they feel like highlights reels. We get to see the people and events which influenced her, without getting an idea of how they influenced her. We can make plenty of inferences from knowing how she turned out in the end, but we're not given a chance to see any of the depth or nuance about how she felt. There's no emotion to the flashbacks.
There's plenty of emotion to the old-lady-with-Alzheimers bits. Those bits are touching and sad and lovely. There's an masterful little scene where Mrs. T. gets needled about some aspect of something or other at a dinner party, and for the briefest of moments you can see she's totally lost. Then her wit and cunning take over and she expertly reads the room and fobs everyone off with a lot of the right words which don't actually say very much.
If The Iron Lady wanted to be about Mrs. T. getting old, then it spent too much time in the flashbacks. On the other hand, if Mrs. T. being old was meant to be a framing story, and The Iron Lady wanted to be about Mrs. T. the politician, it spent too little time and far too little heart in the flashbacks.
Bitterly disappointing, but still worth seeing for Meryl Streep, and the rest of the cast.
Yes, Meryl Streep is truly excellent. The make-up, the voice, the posture, the mannerisms - she captures Margaret Thatcher astonishingly well. The film really is worth seeing for her performance alone. It's not like she's completely buried under latex either; it's obviously Meryl Streep, but also obviously Mrs. T. Yes, the make-up team deserve a lot of credit, as does her voice coach (assuming she had one - if not, well, it's even more impressive), but most of it deservedly goes to Streep.
The rest of the cast are fantastic, including Jim Broadbent as Dennis Thatcher (who I thought wouldn't fit the role at all, but does), Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe, Richard E. Grant as Michael Heseltine, and many others. The locations and sets are also all top-notch. All the parts are there.
With all that brilliant talent in place, they went and made a film that seems to be mostly about this poor old lady who has Alzheimers, struggling to get over the death of her husband, and trying to keep track of her kids, who just happened to be one of the most powerful people in the world for more than a decade.
I've got nothing against sensitive films about the ravages of age and the heartbreak it can cause. That's an intense part of being human which deserves to be explored. It's just that, if you're making a movie about Margaret Thatcher, it's probably the least interesting story you could tell about her.
Oh, there are plenty of flashbacks to her formative years as a child, as a student and Young Conservative, becoming an MP, and all the ups and downs of being PM, but they feel like highlights reels. We get to see the people and events which influenced her, without getting an idea of how they influenced her. We can make plenty of inferences from knowing how she turned out in the end, but we're not given a chance to see any of the depth or nuance about how she felt. There's no emotion to the flashbacks.
There's plenty of emotion to the old-lady-with-Alzheimers bits. Those bits are touching and sad and lovely. There's an masterful little scene where Mrs. T. gets needled about some aspect of something or other at a dinner party, and for the briefest of moments you can see she's totally lost. Then her wit and cunning take over and she expertly reads the room and fobs everyone off with a lot of the right words which don't actually say very much.
If The Iron Lady wanted to be about Mrs. T. getting old, then it spent too much time in the flashbacks. On the other hand, if Mrs. T. being old was meant to be a framing story, and The Iron Lady wanted to be about Mrs. T. the politician, it spent too little time and far too little heart in the flashbacks.
Bitterly disappointing, but still worth seeing for Meryl Streep, and the rest of the cast.