1 – Anyone is allowed to make a film about Margaret Thatcher – just don’t make it dull
For all the silly howls of protest about giant Maggies on a bus, they were perfectly entitled to make a film about Baroness Thatcher if Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein’s brother, Richard Nixon and countless serial killers can be immortalised on the big screen.
Anything less than portraying her as the green-skinned character in The Wizard of Oz wasn’t going to be enough for some people.
The film should have been about all the things she did – good or bad, her ideology, her umpteen wars waged – a political biography. Focusing it on the frailty that comes from getting old sells her life’s work very short as a dramatic conceit.
2 – Meryl Streep’s performance
The problem is that this film is just about the performance. After the Greatest Actress of her Generation was approached to play the grocer’s daughter by her Mamma Mia! director Phyllida Lloyd, my my, how can we resist you? Well, quite easily as it turns out. Fifteen minutes in, I made up my mind it must come to an end. Streep gives a note-perfect performance, and will probably (after she struck out five times with nominations and no wins) collect an Oscar, but the Maggie impression towers over a non-existent story.
3 – That story in full
This movie starts with her buying a pint of milk, and ends with her sending clothes to a charity shop. Spoiler alert: not that much happens in the middle hour-and-a-half.
The film centres around Margaret Thatcher in the current day grieving over her husband’s death and speaking to an imaginary Denis. The justification from the director and screenwriter Abi Morgan (Traffic, Shame) is that daughter Carol wrote about this illness, but that’s a thin excuse for picking on an old lady – even this old lady.
4 – It’s curiously anti-feminist
One of Hollywood’s most powerful actors and a female writer and director collaborate on a film about our first female prime minister and the main theme is… she goes to pieces as soon as her husband goes.
5 – John Sessions is excellent at impersonations…
…really, you could fill a street with them – but, with regret, his Ted Heath is not one of the greatest hits. No one’s going to buy him as a man who could run a country.
6 – If you like her (yes, both of you in Scotland), you won’t like it
For a woman who elicits strong opinions, this film seems like an unfair shot at an old lady. The Falklands war takes barely ten minutes, winning three general elections less so, and her relationship with Denis – the man who encouraged her to stand for leader – is portrayed as him accusing her of being selfish. Documentary evidence suggests the opposite.
7 – If you don’t like her, you won’t like it either
Westland, the poll tax, the miners’ strike, the rift with Nigel Lawson, the fact she landed us with John Major – all glossed over or ignored. But you do get to see her watch The King and I on DVD.
8 – Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine
He’s got the hair and the glasses, but he never quite perfects the famous Hezza “flounce.”
9 – Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet members in The Iron Lady are even more ineffectual than Margaret Thatcher’s real cabinet
The figures in Spitting Image are made to look like Francis Urquhart pitted against those in this film.
Political trainspotters will have fun with Little Britain’s PM, Anthony Head, as Geoffrey Howe, while Roger Allam the Tory in The Thick of It as adviser Gordon Reece and Nicholas Farrell (Tony Blair in Sir David Hare’s Iraq play, Stuff Happens) as Airey Neave also crop up. The central protagonist herself lacks strong antagonists until the film almost ends.
For all that Lloyd talks about King Lear, that had at least four strong characters. This has got one-and-a-half, and the one suffers from dementia through most of it.
10 – The film doesn’t answer the central burning question about a Margaret Thatcher biopic
That question – if they ever made a Maggie Thatcher film, who would play Roy Aitken? It’s all very well glossing over Westland, the miners’ strike, knackering an education system and denying kids milk money – but not including the 1988 Scottish Cup Final? Unforgivable.
Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
Related posts: