Thatcher biopic a bit rusty

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Jim Broadbent portrays Dennis Thatcher and Meryl Streep plays the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the biopic “The Iron Lady.” | The Weinstein Company

Updated: February 14, 2012 8:07AM

You have to be very talented to work with Meryl Streep. It also helps to know how to use her. “The Iron Lady” fails in both of these categories. Streep creates an uncanny impersonation of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but in this film she’s all dressed up with nowhere to go. Director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan seem to have little clear idea of what they think about Thatcher, or what they want to say.

If there has ever been a biopic that required an opinion of its subject, that biopic would seem to be “The Iron Lady.” Thatcher held office for an unprecedented three terms, bitterly divided Great Britain, and led her nation during the Falklands War, which seemed to be largely an exercise in hubris on both sides. Before the war (and now), no one frankly gave a damn about the Falkland Islands, and Thatcher’s foreign policy amounted to: “They’re ours and you bloody well can’t have them.”

Of course, Argentina started the war by invading the Falklands, over which it had disputed Britain’s claim since 1833. And if Argentina mounted a military invasion, what could Thatcher do? She was compelled to defend the islands. The loved ones on either side who lost someone in that war must have been hard-pressed to understand why death was necessary.

That wasn’t Thatcher’s concern. In a striking scene that takes place in her increasingly senile
old age, she declares that ideas are more important to her than feelings. That seems to have been a
governing principle in her life, allowing her to look with apparently limited concern at unemployment, hunger and homelessness on the domestic front.

Few people were neutral in their feelings about her, except the makers of this picture. They approach Thatcher as a figure in a time-honored biographical template in which a convenient fictional mechanism allows the heroine to revisit key chapters in her life so that we can understand that it was quite a life, indeed.

From her humble beginnings as the proverbial “grocer’s daughter from Grantham,” she began on the lowest rungs of the Conservative Party and never paused in her climb. Her ambition was unlimited, her strategy ruthless, her victims many of the male generation the Conservatives thought they were grooming for power. Was hers a feminist triumph? She herself seems hardly to have thought of it that way, and there are scenes here suggesting an emotional distance from her children and a marriage based on the self-effacement of her recessive husband (Jim Broadbent).

Was she a monster? A heroine? The movie has no opinion. Whatever your feelings were about Thatcher were before you saw the movie, you now have some images to accompany it. Part of its failure may be attributed to the director Phyllida Lloyd, whose first feature also starred Streep. That was “Mamma Mia!” (2008), not a high point in Ms. Streep’s career.

“The Iron Lady” really could have used a few behind-the-scenes moments showing what her rivals, particularly in the Conservative power struggles, really thought and said about her.