The Iron Lady

The consensus, from the reviews I’ve read, seems to be that The Iron Lady is a mediocre film with a stunning performance at its centre from Meryl Streep. I’d say that was fair – though to be honest, I don’t think the plot could ever please everyone. If it condemned Thatcher, it would be called a leftist fantasy and a distortion. If it painted her as saintly, it would get torn apart by all those who recall just how divisive Thatcher was. And sitting in the middle as it does, focusing on her Alzheimer’s and trying to project a balanced view, it gets decried for fence-sitting and having nothing to say.

I’m just about old enough to remember Thatcherite Britain, though more of my childhood memories come from the period when John Major was in power. My parents were comfortably middle-class and reaped some of the benefits of Thatcherism, so my early childhood was comfortable, brightly-coloured and joyful, one I will consider a kind of ideal just before the age of the Internet forever changed what it was like to be a kid, and which I hope I’ll live long enough to see painted as a kind of Utopia in films. But while we were comfortable in the 80s boom, my Dad was always left-leaning, had purposely chosen to work in an area with little wealth so that he was in low-income houses every day and was originally from a working-class background. While we had a strict – and pretty early – bedtime, one thing we were allowed to watch as a family despite all the vulgarity and swearing was Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show. So I grew up knowing at least through the lens of satire who the people in this film were – Thatcher herself, and Hurd and Heseltine and Howe. Thatcher was to me what she was on Spitting Image – a schoolmarm tightly controlling a cabinet of unintelligent man-children, who relieved herself in a urinal, heard the advice of Hitler in hiding and thought his ideas quite brilliant and of course, in that famous sketch that according to Ian Hislop now gets repeated by ex-cabinet members as though it really happened, answered the waiter’s ‘What about the vegetables?’ with ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me.’

Here, though, is something of a humanised Thatcher. The most interesting part, sadly all but skipped through, is how she went from being laughed at as a woman in a man’s world with no hope of election to being elected as an MP, rising up to become education secretary and finally Prime Minister. This is a fascinating success story that sadly, while represented, is a disjointed series of flashbacks, which seems to me a wasted opportunity. Four major elements of Thatcher’s tenure follow: the contrast between increased wealth for the UK while unemployment also skyrocketed; the breaking of the unions; the conflict in the Falklands with Thatcher’s excellent counter to why we should go to war over land most in the country don’t even care about and which is thousands of miles away – that on those grounds it is just like Hawaii for the US; and the poll tax, perhaps Thatcher’s biggest mistake and here shows as almost a direct cause for her party turning against her.

The very idea of a film about Thatcher struck me as absurd, but the more I thought about it, the more curious I became, and when Streep won the Golden Globe and is now hotly tipped for an Oscar, I knew that it would be a film worth seeing. Personally, I neither loathe Thatcher nor worship her. She was a strong leader at a time the country needed one. The Unions may not have needed breaking, but big changes had to happen and it’s uncertain whether or not they could be implemented any other way. The Falklands were justifiable but certainly more could have been done diplomatically – though it’s very likely without military response Argentina would not have budged. And the poll tax was always utterly absurd.

But Thatcherism is where Britain totally changed, including in the backlash against Britain. As the first scene with Thatcher buying some milk covertly makes plain, Britain today is almost nothing like the Britain Thatcher grew up in, and it’s only the coming decades that can show us whether or not that is for good or ill. Had Thatcher been in power longer, would we have almost no industry today outside pharmaceuticals? Without her, would we have far better exports today and not rely so much on banking? Would immigration and the EU be different? We don’t ask these questions of John Major.

Because I wanted neither an evisceration nor a deification, I don’t mind the presentation of Thatcher’s life. But what I did not like was the bulk of the film being given over to Alzheimer’s – the part that will likely win Streep the Oscar. It’s pure pandering to the Academy and the shadow of Iris is everywhere – after all, Dench really ought to have won the Oscar Halle Berry got in what I still feel was uncomfortably tokenism, and Jim Broadbent, playing a similar role to the one he plays here, won Best Supporting Actor for it. It seems cruel to portray a woman still alive as hallucinating her dead husband all the time, and seemed to me a very simple-minded portrayal of Alzheimer’s. It allowed for strong performances, yes, but for me the balance was all off and I couldn’t help thinking of all those satirical ‘how to win the Oscar’ comics and cartoons.

So yes, I agree with the verdict that this is a mediocre film centred on a strong performance – but perhaps my reasons for finding it mediocre are different from others’. Oh, and I don’t know why Anthony Head seemed to be impersonating not Geoffrey Howe but my Uncle Ray, but it really tickled me.