-
Wincing at Cumberbatch
May 21, 2013 | 238 comments
-
Pain & Gain
May 7, 2013 | 6 comments
-
As She Likes It
April 30, 2013 | 13 comments
-
42
April 23, 2013 | 19 comments
-
56 Up
April 17, 2013 | 7 comments
Movie Takes
The Iron Lady
Entirely missing the point of what made her historic.
All the review of The Iron Lady that you really need is to be found in the headline to a recent article in the Times of London by Daniel Finkelstein: “Thatcher was not just strong. She was right.” Unless this be granted, the case goes by default that the former British prime minister was the monster of left-wing caricature. The difficulty for the film-makers — Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) directed, Abi Morgan (Shame) wrote the screenplay — is that they don’t want the caricature but they don’t want her to be right either. To get around this difficulty they have made a political movie from which the politics has been extracted as a taxidermist draws out the brain of an animal he is stuffing through its nose. If there were any politics in it, they would have had to pick a side and portray Margaret Thatcher as essentially right or essentially wrong, so offending a significant portion of their potential audience who are, more than 30 years later, still passionately committed to one view or the other. But there are two senses in which the Thatcher premiership was historic. One is the political sense that the film avoids; the other, chosen by the Mses. Lloyd and Morgan, is the merely journalistic sense of “historic” — that is, because she was the first woman to hold the office of the Queen’s first minister. In other words she was strong; on the question of whether she was right or not, the film mostly tries to remain agnostic — and uncontroversial.
Taking the view that the career of Baroness Thatcher (as she now is) was really all about her sex has another benefit from the film-makers’ point of view, since it gives them an opportunity to bang on endlessly about the paradox of the title. How can a Lady be of Iron? Yet we see Mrs. Thatcher (as she then was) being so strong and masterful in running the country, yet so weak and feminine on her human side, especially now that (as has been widely reported) she is suffering from a form of senile dementia (not Alzheimer’s disease). Thus, ahead of the title, we have an opening scene of an old lady buying milk in a convenience store. She is unrecognized by anyone even though, twenty years earlier, hers was the most familiar face in Britain. She is visibly decrepit: frail, doddery and confused, and these obvious human weaknesses are meant to contrast strikingly with the title when it comes up after her little adventure results in a scolding for her negligent bodyguards. “The Iron Lady” indeed!
OK. We get it. but do we have to keep getting it? The authors just can’t seem to get over what they would no doubt call the irony of it, and so the whole political life of Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep), very far from being the most inconsequential one they could have chosen, is squeezed into less than half the movie’s length in order to make room for these clumsy contrasts — look upon this picture and upon this — between the Iron Lady and the irony lady. Or the ironing lady, since the equally uninteresting contrast between the expectations of young housewives when Lady Thatcher was one and the strong leader she was to become is also exploited for all it is worth — and a good deal more than it’s worth, in my opinion. At one point, they even have the young Margaret (Alexandra Roach) telling her husband-to-be (Harry Lloyd) that she doesn’t want to die washing up a teacup. “One’s life must matter, Denis, beyond the washing up. Say you understand.”
“That’s why I want to marry you, my dear,” replies Denis. It is a tender moment between them, one of many in the film, but, sure enough, though she doesn’t die, we see her washing up a teacup before she wanders off, still doddering and confused, into the shadows in the final scene. Together with hints from Denis’s ghost (Jim Broadbent), with whom she carries on regular conversations, and from her daughter, Carol (Olivia Colman) — Carol’s twin brother Mark, now living in South Africa, does not make an appearance — the suggestion is one of regret on the film-makers’ part if not on hers that she was not “there” for husband and children as wife and mother on account of her hard-charging and all-consuming political career. It’s an astonishingly retro message for such a film, but perhaps the logical result of its nearly complete de-politicization of that career. And the feminists won’t protest because it’s Margaret Thatcher who they, too, must wish had stayed in the kitchen.
Apart from anything else, the extreme de-emphasis on the truly historical nature of her premiership deprives us of more of Meryl Streep’s uncanny impersonation — to say nothing of making us wonder what makes her important enough to be the subject of a movie. All that which stirred the passions of Britons — and, to a remarkable extent, Americans too — at the time is left out. “Monetarism” and the battle against inflation and industrial stagnation, the epic battle against Soviet Communism, IRA bombs and hunger strikers, Brussels bureaucracy and the striking National Union of Mineworkers, privatization of nationalized industries, the sale of council houses or state-built and -run housing to tenants, the modernization of the post-industrial British economy and, incidentally, of the opposition Labour Party, the military and diplomatic assertion of Britain’s prominent place in the world — all of this is simply left out, or reduced to flashback images in the mind of a woman for whom their meaning is apparently as obscure as it is for the audience.
Even where the film portrays actual historical events, it has no interest in why or how they happened or what Mrs. Thatcher did in response to them. There are brief accounts of the Falklands War in 1982 and the Brighton bomb of 1984, though they are included out of sequence and leave out any explanation of the reasons for either, or of what she did about them. The IRA bomb that went off in the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Tory party conference made her a victim, but we do not see her indomitable insistence on speaking the next day anyway. And the point of the passage on the Falklands is merely to show her in quasi-heroic postures — including her ordering of the sinking of the Argentine battleship General Belgrano — as a tough, unfeminine, and unfeeling military leader before the film’s headlong rush through a montage of the intervening eight years to a representation of her cruel imperiousness in cabinet (which is invented) and her subsequent downfall when Sir Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head), the man she humiliated, turned on her.
Many of Lady Thatcher’s admirers, including her official biographer, Charles Moore, and her collaborator on her memoirs, John O’Sullivan, have had good things about the film, since the payoff for its leaving out all the politics, which is to say all the reality of her career, has been a largely sympathetic if pitying portrait of the lady herself in what it is pleased to describe as her dotage. I understand their sense of relief that this most hated woman of her time is allowed to appear sympathetic, but I can’t help feeling that such a reaction shows how low our expectations of movies have become, if we are pathetically grateful for a Thatcher portrait that dares to present her as human. The fierce hatred of her on the left was and is still owing to the left’s fierce need to believe of the woman who made “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) her watchword that there was an alternative — the alternative of infinite drift and decline — the fantasy of which the haters cling to along with their hate. That she was right is the one thing such people can never admit, and it is out of deference to such people, now perhaps fewer than they were at the time, that this movie has been made.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (20) | Leave a comment
More Articles by James Bowman
More Articles From Movie Takes
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/23/the-iron-lady
Follow us:
ADVERTISEMENT
SPONSORED LINKS
FLASHBACK TO: 1995
-
Pope Culture
A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
-
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
-
Dames at Sea
-
In the Absence of Guns
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
-
The Metaphysical Martini
-
Counting the Costs of Clintonism
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
-
Chuck McHagel
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
-
The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
-
It’s the Best Time of the Year
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
-
The Bush Crack-Up
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
Clip of the Day
H/T to National Review Online
ADVERTISEMENT
Vivian| 1.23.12 @ 6:57AM
Well put. I never planned on seeing this film because of early comments on her less than truthful portrayal. You have validated my suspicions.
Appleby| 1.23.12 @ 7:16AM
Perhaps when the conservatives get back into control, a better movie will be made about her, and a really good one about Ronald Reagan, and maybe even a movie that shows how the two reinforced one another. And perhaps, like The King's Speech, it will draw a series of sellout audiences among adults, to the great confusion of the movie houses who planned to show it in one theatre and stuff all the others with screamingly loud movies about vampires.
Margaret Thatcher was the woman I once planned to be, save that I was informed that it was no use training Girls to be anything because they just got pregnant and quit. I would like to see how she handled my job.
Vern Crisler| 1.23.12 @ 9:20AM
Hollywood will never produce a good movie about Gipperus Magnus. Never. The only reason any halfway sympathetic movie was produced about Margaret Thatcher is because they can pump the tiresome cliche of the strong woman against male-dominated society. Borrring. Reagan has no similar leftist appeal.
Should Have Impeached| 1.23.12 @ 8:00PM
Why can't some filthy-rich conservatives make truthful movies about conservative figures, if only to keep the record straight and complete? Do they really think no one would go and watch? I think truth would be more exciting than mush; and like listening to Rush Limbaugh, it would give progressives a lot to talk (and complain) about.
Stammon| 1.23.12 @ 12:27PM
I literally did a body jerk when I read your "no use training Girls". As a father of three girls, I am sorry that you were not encouraged to become what you wanted to be. I will not see this movie, the left cannot separate it's ideological hatred from the lives of us people. They wish Utopia, they create Easter Island. They strive to impose Eden, they produce Dystopia.
Hollywood cannot make a truthful movie about a Reagen or Thatcher, it would upset their stomachs.
colliemum| 1.23.12 @ 7:17AM
See also the comments by Norman Tebbit, one of Mrs Thatcher's senior cabinet ministers, former leader of the Conservative Party - and victim of the 1984 Brighton Bombing:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/n.....mantebbit/
He says: 'If the real Margaret Thatcher had been like Meryl Streep's Iron Lady, I wouldn't have supported her'
croashun| 1.23.12 @ 8:30AM
My wife and I saw it. It was a remarkable Streep acting tour-de-force, suppressing, depressing and diminishing the titular person. Typical Hollywood: lionize the producer-director-screenwriter-actor (and, yes, the PC cause-du-jour) at the expense of the putative subject. We concur that the true Baroness Thatcher movie is yet to be filmed.
PaulyD| 1.23.12 @ 9:16AM
You really didn't expect the movie industry to make an accurate portrayal of a conservative now did you? We should not be wishing for things that will never happen.
Seek| 1.23.12 @ 2:09PM
Films aren't Heritage Backgrounders on celluloid. And they shouldn't be. The point was not to make a "conservative movie"; it was to understand the character. "The Iron Lady" is storytelling, not policy wonkery. Good for Hollywood.
Steven J. Thompson| 1.23.12 @ 5:32PM
I'm pretty sure Mr. Bowman's point was that a movie that treats her actual policy views and political decisions as nearly irrelevant to her career doesn't understand the character of Margaret Thatcher, nor will it help anyone else to do so.
OryGun| 1.23.12 @ 10:05AM
The world was fortunate to have a Margaret Thatcher in a time of need. That was the last time the Brits stood tall on the stage of the world. Hopefully, we will find a person of such character in the near future. Oh, and Hollywood should lock the door and turn the light out as they are becoming incapable of making anything to watch.
Gr0w1er601| 1.23.12 @ 10:20AM
About the only things you can take as fact from this movie (or anything else made in Hollywood) is that, yes, there was a female Prime Minister of Britain, and that her name is Margaret Thatcher.
nathan| 1.23.12 @ 10:28AM
What's missing in all the commentaries on Mrs. Thatcher is perhaps her greatest failing? What did she do to roll back gun control? Anything? Did she during her tenure as Prime Minister assert the right of British citizens to keep and bear arms? Did she at any point push the parliament that she so thoroughly dominated to eliminate once and for any and all restrictions on the rights of British citizens to protect themselves? Many of those laws went back to the inter war years and could have been repealed during her time in office. She had no interest in doing so a failing she shared with President Reagan did she not? He also seemed somewhat uninterested in this subject having signed gun control bill(s) in California.
We can applaud their efforts in connection with Cold War although at least some of the demise of the Soviet Union was a result of the Soviets going bankrupt and getting involved in foreign ventures they couldn't afford. But on certain domestic issues they showed a distinct lack of interest.
shipley130| 1.23.12 @ 3:30PM
The question we have to start asking the left wing welfare promoters is why they don't mind millions of people sitting around, doing nothing, and getting paid for nothing. Do they really want a faceless IRS employee taking money from them and give that to a faceless welfare system employee to give to a faceless welfare queen?
ABNCP| 1.23.12 @ 4:10PM
I was llivilng in England during Margret Thatcher's time in office. It was my last duty assigment in the USAF from 1978 - 1982. When I arrived the Labor Party had been in office since 1974 with James Callaghan running the country or better stated trying to run the country. By 1978 Callaghan and the Labor party had run out of ideas, energy and the abililty to control the unions at all. The unions were really in charge of running England because they controled the Labor Party. The unions were the partys paymasters, funding the partys coffers from pounds deducted from millions of workers wages (the workers had no say as to where that money went). The unions disposed power by huge block votes (does that sound familiar?) and they gave those votes to whom they chose.
By that time Labor had been taken over by the hard left because in 1973 the hard left had managed to delete the proscribed list from the Labor's organizational rules that had been in place since the Labor Party's formation. The proscribed list had excluded any Marxist/Lennists or other hard left organizations from being a part of the Labor Party. By 1978 England was in chaos. There were strikes going on all the time. Garbage was not being picked up, dead people were not being buried, the British Auto industry was on strike more oftern than not.
The election of 1979 brought Thatcher into office.
Almost immediately the country started to change.
She brought organization, common sense, disipline and good management back to British government.
Of course the left hated her. The BBC and other media like the Manchester Guardian newspaper had nothing but vitriol to spout about Thatcher. The majortiy of the British people however were a lot more enthusiastic about what she was accomplishing.
POST American| 1.23.12 @ 8:53PM
"America had better watch it or
in a couple of decades we're going
to be a minstrel show --for RED China."
-Gore Vidal
1985
"There are Britons now coming
of age who will NEVER see work.
--They'd better get used to it."
-Margaret Thatcher
1989
Thatcher was herself a high profile
publicist and apologist, nay, advocate
for the CFR-RIIA 'shadow government'.
She was certainly presiding and enabling
the very heyday of teh Globalist-RED China
set up and TREASON OP.
Her curretn mental state, like Reagan's,
may very well be connected to the overwhelming
revelation of what she was a part o, what she'd
done, what she so ably helped bring into
being.
Of course NONE of that will be dealt with,
or even alluded to in this capstone authorized
biography.
-------------------NUREMBERG 2012------------------
RickZ| 1.23.12 @ 9:33PM
Clearly, the performance of the English Lieutenant's Woman was weighted down by a desire to portray Thatcher negatively. .......
Accuracy Disclosure.
The General Belgrano was indeed sunk by the British nuclear hunter-killer submarine HMS Conqueror.
The Belgrano was built as USS Phoenix (CL-46), a light cruiser launched in March 1938. She survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, earned 9 battle stars, and was decommissioned from the US Navy after World War II in July 1946.
The USS Phoenix was sold to Argentina, along with her sister ship, the USS Boise (CL-47), for US $7.8 million in 1951.
POST American| 1.23.12 @ 9:40PM
---------------------FINAL WORD-----------------------
Putting aside Hollywood's latest deliberate
diss of the awesomely relevant 60th Anniversary
of the --------KOREAN WAR---------
Rectum worshippers, porch 'MAY-SINS'
and 'KNEE--oh! CONS, one and all take
heed of the ungracious disintegrations
of Reagan, Steve Jobs and, now, Thatcher.
Serving the New World Order really
does carry a price for the soul.
DYING time really is ----TRUTH TIME.
------------------------------------FOR REAL.
----------------HUAC/ Nuremberg 2012---------------
Eleni Antonaropoulou | 1.24.12 @ 2:25PM
www.unsungfilms.com, by Eleni Antonaropoulou
The life of Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the longest-running one, presented in a really “interesting” movie.
I think that it is well understood by everyone, that thanks to Meryl Streep, who holds the leading role, this movie just might be worth seeing. Without her, Thatcher remains a firm and conservative politician, hated by many and appreciated by few; notorious for her strictness and absoluteness in all decisions, which make her a less attractive personality and a loathed political leader.
This movie is a combination of Thatcher’s political and personal life. Thatcher in her late 80’s is suffering from dementia and is sinking into her own memories of childhood and her glory days as Britain’s Prime Minister. The whole movie is based on the typical structure of a combination of her actual life and the necessary flash backs. The screenplay strongly emphasizes the woman behind the “Iron Lady”, trying to show more of the personal life than the political one.
Meryl Streep who incarnates the “Iron Lady” is, as always, perfect, and proves to everybody once again that she is worthy of her powerful status in the world of cinema. The resemblance is so remarkable that there are moments in which the audience feel like they are a watching a high-budget documentary, and not a film. Also, the whole supporting cast was well chosen, with Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher and Susan Brown as June, Thatcher’s daughter, backing Meryl Streep effectively.
On the downside, the movie seemed somewhat less British than I expected it and far less politically orientated than I wanted it. It seemed more like an American feature, even though director, Phyllida Lloyd made her name as a British theatre director and with Mamma Mia being her latest film.
Overall, “The Iron Lady” is another movie that proves Streep’s perfect performance, a film that will make someone Google the Falklands War and remind us that being a leader, good or bad, is always a hard thing to do.
Eleni Antonaropoulou at www.unsungfilms.com
POST American| 1.24.12 @ 11:57PM
---------------------FINAL WORD-----------------------
"Understand, Thatcher was behind opening
the doors of Britain to unlimited immigration
as far back as the 70's.
Remember folks, Globalism -
--means the 'Free movement of labor
across ALLL borders'. That's the KEY
plank-----that spells cultural destruction
---and in the long term --even economic
destruction. AGAIN ---EUGENICS."
Thatcher was a 'brought in', 'on board'
economic EUGENIST and self proclaimed
Globalist and member of the 'Shadow Government'.