The Iron Lady: What were they thinking?

By Chris Marsden, WSWS.ORG

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, written by Abi Morgan

The Iron Lady, a fictional account of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s rise and fall, should have been at the very least interesting, even an important work. So how did it, with the sole exception of a truly remarkable performance by Meryl Streep as Thatcher, end up as such a spectacular misfire?

This is a poor piece of work. Without Streep’s central performance, and that of the generally stellar cast in support, The Iron Lady would have all the emotional clout and artistic integrity of a Hallmark made-for-television movie.

On one level, how such a series of hopelessly compromising decisions could have been taken by the moving spirits behind the work, director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Abi Morgan, appears inexplicable.

Take as your subject the woman most closely associated with a period of dramatic social and political change and explosive class conflict—not just in Britain, but internationally—and reduce all that to a largely incoherent and uncritically presented backdrop. Then focus, in equal measure, on the frailty of a once powerful figure now suffering from dementia and a love story, presented in the form of a series of imagined interactions between Thatcher and her dead husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent).

This device is used to humanise Thatcher. As Phyllida Lloyd told theGuardian, her film is “About loss, about identity and old age and facing oblivion.… It’s about us. It’s about our mums. It’s about our dads. And us. How we will be.… We’re not asking people to vote differently. It’s just a contemplation of mortality. This isn’t a plea for forgiveness for policy. It’s a contemplation of the cost of a big life.”

If that was all that The Iron Lady attempted to do, it would be a pretty shallow affair. After all, we know that Thatcher is a human being, with human frailties. But why choose the former prime minister, someone only interesting for thespecifics of her public life, as the supposed embodiment of a universal human experience?

Things are made worse by the film’s largely sympathetic treatment of Thatcher, including the presentation of her political views and actions in government. Lloyd describes Thatcher in fairly glowing terms, as a “a mighty leader who rises to power, against all the odds, who holds the line when others are losing their faith, who becomes a global superstar, and then, either through their own hubris or as they see it, the treachery of everyone around them, crashes to an ignominious end.”

A feminist herself, Lloyd casts Thatcher as something of a feminist icon, describing her own reaction to the latter’s election victory in 1979 as “Yes! That is the first of us through the door.”  ¶

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