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.
