LOOSELY BASED ON JOHN CAMPBELL’S BIOGRAPHY, THE IRON LADY: MARGARET THATCHER, FROM GROCER’S DAUGHTER TO PRIME MINISTER.
STARRING MERYL STREEP, JIM BROADBENT, OLIVIA COLMAN, ANTHONY HEAD, MICHAEL HESELTINE, PIP TORRENS AND ANGELA CURRAN AS CRAWFIE.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
I didn’t grow up or ever live in Maggie Thatcher’s England, otherwise I mightn’t have bawled so hard at this rather emotional and sentimental depiction of the Iron Lady’s life and times.
Meryl Streep is fabulous, as always, as the woman who went from being a grocer’s daughter to Britain’s longest serving (in the twentieth century) and first ever female Prime Minister.
The story is told partly in flashbacks depicting Mrs. Thatcher’s ascent to power in the Conservative party, and partly in scenes from the ‘present day,’ about eight years after the death of her beloved husband, Denis, beautifully played by that old stalwart of the British screen, Jim Broadbent.
That places the action in 2011, two years before Margaret Thatcher died in 2013. (Did she see this film? It’s not particularly unflattering, but she may have been made uncomfortable at the scenes in which she was depicted as being not in her right mind, or in which her late husband appears.)
The bits from the present are very sad, hence me crying my eyes out for the old lady with dementia who talks to her deceased husband all the time because she’s actually seeing visions of him; it’s as if he never left. In these ‘present day’ clips, she is finally going through Denis’s clothes and other effects with a view to sending them to charity, never an easy thing to do.
This is what her daughter Carol thinks she should do, put away the past and get on with her life. Carol is left with the main care of her mother, though the elderly former Prime Minister has a staff who make sure she’s always ready- suited, pussy-bow-tied, made-up and coiffed- to be wheeled out for yet another appointment, such as another fancy dinner at which her opinions on current affairs are sought, or the unveiling of yet another portrait of her for posterity.
Carol Thatcher is one hundred percent present for her ageing mum, but, typically, it’s the deceased Denis and the absent son Mark, ensconced with his own family on the other side of the world, for whom the old lady pines day and night. What’s that they say? A daughter’s a daughter for all of her life; a son’s just a son till he gets him a wife…
Via the flashbacks, we see the Iron Lady (this very apt nickname came from the Russians) grappling with some of the major issues and incidents from her eleven years in office as the Prime Minister; the Brixton riot in 1981; the Miners’ Strike from 1984-1985; the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party Conference of 1984. Some despicable people obviously found the presence of so many Tories in the one place, including Maggie and Denis, to be just too irresistible.
Then there was the Falklands War in 1982. Men on both sides of the short but bloody conflict died, and poor Prince Andrew sadly lost forever his ability to sweat, but Maggie and her Brits seized those islands back from the pesky Argentinians, giving her the reputation of a leader with balls of steel, though she concealed them handsomely beneath her well-tailored blue skirt suits.
Her heyday was the 1980s. In the film, she is portrayed in the 1990s as something of an anachronism, squabbling with her ministers, in particular Geoffrey Howe, who resigned after one such public bollocking (yes, I could have said ‘dressing-down’ there but saying bollocking instead is keeping it real, man!).
She also insists that poor people should pay as much as rich people pay in the deeply unpopular Poll Tax, a tax for simply existing, as far as I can make out. She has no choice but to step down when she realises she’s lost the support of much of her cabinet for her draconian policies.
Comedy sketch show SPITTING IMAGE did very well out of her, and also out of her successor, the mild-mannered John Major. ‘The peas are good today, Norma.’ But it’s the sketch of Maggie and her cabinet out to dinner on one occasion that I’ll never forget. Maggie orders her meat course, and then the waiter asks her what about the vegetables?
‘They’ll have what I’m having,’ replies the Lady who is not for Turning.
Ouch…
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