Review: The Iron Lady

Thursday, 12 January 2012

Margaret Thatcher is a divisive figure, it is true. There are normal people who stand in awe at the enormity of her accomplishment, the depth of her integrity and sincerity and the strength of her resolve as a fearless woman in a cruelly misogynistic world. Then there are the whingeing fuckwits who say they can’t stand her as a way of courting popularity with their mates.

But whatever your view of Britain’s greatest peacetime Prime Minister – actually, let’s make that greatest ever Prime Minister – if you have an ounce of human sensibility in your body you can’t but be appalled at the callous abuse of a woman in her twilight years for such shallow dramatic purposes.

I say shallow because there is no artistic purpose whatsoever to the depictions in this film of Maggie as an aging half-wit. They only serve to reduce the time available to its admittedly sublime highlights: those moments during Thatcher’s leadership – her triumphant acceptance speech on May 3, 1979, her fearlessness and clear thinking during the Falklands conflict – that the film manages to re-enact with almost their original grandeur.

The unnecessary and discomfiting diversions into her overwrought, dotty present eat into time that ought to have been spent recreating some of the more apocalyptic moments in her career. Where was her fateful “No, No, No”? Or even “The community charge will be very popular?”

Instead, we have a rambling and incoherent movie that cannot perform as a biopic on its own terms and relies on our knowledge of Thatcher’s life to sustain itself. It proves entirely incapable of keeping a narrative of its own going for more than five or ten minutes. (This is, of course, one of the risks of getting in a female director.)

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to us that the liberal hegemony of the movie industry would have debased a living conservative icon in this way, but, every time The Iron Lady snaps back to the present and we’re again treated to the vision of a barking mad old pensioner chatting idly to her dead husband, it does.

Sorry to bang on, but this cannot be repeated often enough: it is a scandal that a biopic of Margaret Thatcher should depict her as a demented old codger, desperately clinging to fantasies that her husband is still alive and weeping as his spectre leaves her for the last time. It is disrespectful and it is offensive.

And it reminds me why it is so utterly essential that Baroness Thatcher should be awarded a state funeral when the unhappy time comes. It’s the least we can do, after her humiliation at the hands of over-rated barbarian harpy Meryl Streep.

There is a sliver of a silver lining. Those portions of the film that depict the Baroness as she allegedly is now (close friends protest that the film overdoes it enormously) at least provide an opportunity for the ridicule of her comically incapable daughter, Carol. Poor Carol. She’s portrayed, viciously but brilliantly, by Olivia Coleman as a hapless, lisping, brain-dead and self-regarding Sloane only slightly less neglectful than the grocer’s grandson, Mark.

Coleman captures perfectly an egotistical, out-of-touch and air-headed daughter, a woman who is, scarily, otherwise known as the Hon. Carol Thatcher, and who was most recently seen on our screens in such productions as I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and Most Haunted.

Aside from Coleman, the casting in this film is sloppy. Dodgy, even. Anthony Stewart Head should stick to playing eccentric librarians. John Sessions is a ridiculous Edward Heath. Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine? And the less said about Jim Broadbent the better.

There was a way in which this biopic might have navigated the politically sensitive line between eulogy and humane biography. That was not the direction The Iron Lady’sproducers elected to take.

Don’t watch this film. Don’t buy the DVD. Don’t pirate it, don’t watch it at a friend’s house. No. Boycott this spiteful, directionless, morally bankrupt and narratologically hopeless hate-fest.

Send a message to its actors, its producers, its directors and its backers – surprise surprise, that leering cesspit of luvviedom the UK Film Council figures prominently in the opening credits – that such foully exploitative fiction should never have been released in the great lady’s lifetime, if ever.

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