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Posted 6th January 2012
Bit of an odd blog this time, hope you had a good new year and have not yet broken ALL of your resolutions. I just thought I'd take a moment to write a film review as I've just got back from the cinema.
The Iron Lady
I have to say I wasn't totally sure what I expected of this film. On principle I don't pay attention to reviews from people I don't know and it looks like I'm the first one of my friends to see this.
Personally I am unsure of my opinion of ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, I grew up with adults around me still seething about her, still hating her even though she was out of office. But for me, to make that much of an impression on a country, on a world, makes me wonder if I should respect her for simply DOING things and having the nerve to simply make decisions that people wouldn't be happy with. I guess I've grown up during the period in Britain where nobody does anything cos they're scared of upsetting someone or messing up the balance. For instance, the only reason I can remember who John Major was (the guy who followed Thatcher as Prime Minster) is because of his caricature in Spitting Image (left)! No idea what he did for the country.
Anyway, the film. Straight to the point, it's not a brilliant film. It's a film that quite simply stumbles along and flutters about as though it's a wall of post-it notes and the window is open. The story and flow just don't work for me, there are times when it genuinely feels like an unbiased documentary about a woman's life taking you through her highs and lows, her triumphs and her mistakes, and then it will suddenly cut to a total propaganda section punching you in the face to feel sympathy for her.
It feels as though there was a script, then someone with a red pen got to it and put "this bit may stop people liking her, do something like this instead", the same way that Michael Bay (of Transformers infamy) might go "this bit is too slow, we need to put an explosion or a car chase in".
The "plot" follows Lady Thatcher (Meryl Streep) near to present day as she lives coping with dementia and being an old biddy being old, imagining her dead husband Dennis (Jim Broadbent) is still talking to her and alive. The film works like an edition of Tales From The Crypt with old-Thatcher as the crypt keeper having trips down memory lane and reminiscing or weeping over flashbacks of her life. In places this works, in others it doesn't. The sections with Young Thatcher are cringeworthy, with Dennis proposing to her only for Thatcher to go into a speech about how she refuses to be a house wife and she'll never be the sort of woman to wash dishes as the stirring music rises beneath her words.
I think I just heard a suffragette clapping from the 1930s.
Just one.
Often in The Iron Lady it's not what's BEING said, it's the way it's said. It feels like the film has no idea how to lead its audience and the music and words are expecting the audience to feel something while they're actually feeling the total opposite.
HOWEVER...
...it is impossible not to say that Meryl Streep is amazing. It feels weird saying this but it's great to see real acting again. Throughout the film she IS Thatcher, from mannerisms down to speech and you get a constant feel for her and what she's thinking and what she must be going through. One of those roles where you forget that it's a person you've seen in plenty of other films, you ALMOST even forget sodding Mamma Mia.
When myself and Ian Lawlor (from 12 Ft Beast Productions) went to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (awesome film, bleak but amazing) I remember him saying that Dragon Tattoo will probably miss out on all the awards and fame because of films like The Iron Lady. All honesty, if there's any justice in the world that won't happen, however Streep does deserve the Best Actress award for The Iron Lady even if it winning Best Film would whiff of money changing hands.
The simple fact is that no matter how good Streep's performance is, even she can't save the film from itself and the heavy handed script. I have to say there are times when the Britishness of everything she does and her tone of voice got to me, but that is what Thatcher was like as Prime Minister.
All in all I give the film a score of 4/10, mainly for Streep's performance and the way that some dark events weren't skimmed over as I expected them to be.
In the end I left feeling sympathy for Thatcher, not because the film depicts her as a poor defenceless old widow who just did what she felt she needed to do and everyone ended up hating her for it, but because the film shows a flicker, a hint of a great life and story that still needs to be told by better writers. It might not be a happy story, it might be about a woman who did damage the country in some people's eyes, but it's an important part of British history that needs to be told well.
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