The Iron Lady
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd
Distributed by The Weinstein Co.
Have you ever watched something cook in the oven? It’s sort of interesting. You see the brown start to slowly spread out, and things puff up. Of course, it’s not something one makes a habit of doing, but it is slightly more amusing than watching paint dry.
My interest level while watching The Iron Lady landed somewhere between those two activities. It was slightly more interesting than watching paint dry, but if I had my night to do over again, I think I’d whip up a nice soufflé and work on my Delissio tan.
This is in no way Meryl Streep’s fault. For the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, I had completely forgotten that the well-known actress was actually the dilly-dallying old woman in front of me. My only complaint here is that she’s too pretty to really capture the unique homeliness of Margaret Thatcher.
Unfortunately, this was part of the problem. As it turns out, Thatcher is pretty boring when she’s not screwing over the poor. At least half of the movie has Streep dawdling around as the aged Thatcher, trying to decipher between memory and reality.
This is simply not entertaining. I know what senile old women do. I have a grandmother. I was way more interested in seeing why Thatcher was polled as “the most disliked prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom” than I was to see what she was doing these days.
She’s 80. I have a fairly good idea of what she’s doing now: trying not to wet herself and pretending like she knows what you’re talking about. Neither of these things are all that story-worthy.
I get what director Phyllida Lloyd was trying to do, of course. She was trying to appeal to the masses (who largely couldn’t give two hoots about politics) by showing the human side of Thatcher. Unfortunately, in doing so, she glazed over many of the policies that made The Iron Lady so controversial (read: interesting).
All the men in the film Thatcher comes up against are slimy, pig-headed, women-hating bigots. Being the first woman prime minister would have undoubtedly led to some conflicts of this nature, but it was obvious that Lloyd was emphasizing this aspect to make up for the lack of controversial content. She even conveniently forgot to show the other 19 female MPs who were in office at the same time Thatcher became prime minister.
The score was OK, even if they did go over the top with it once or twice. I’m thinking of the scene where a politician is ragging on Thatcher for sounding “screechy.” His jowls are quivering and his finger keeps hammering down while he spits out the classic, “I am a man so I think women are intrinsically derp” lingo, and some ominous “this-guy’s-an-asshole” music hammers on in the background.
Visually, the film was also just OK. There are a few nice transition shots, when old Thatcher’s reality and memory become confused in her head, but there’s nothing groundbreaking.
Some of the rare excitement came when the film cut to montages of riots, but people who don’t follow Thatcher’s career won’t really know why those are happening.
All in all, the movie was what you expect from most Hollywood blockbusters these days: something that tries to use money to paper machete over the fact that they sacrificed edginess for mass appeal.
Streep’s performance really is top-notch, but it’s too bad she couldn’t use her skills in a more intriguing manner. Simply reading facts on Thatcher’s Wikipedia page is more entertaining than this over-saturated snooze.
