The Iron Lady
Phyllida Lloyd (2011)
Apart from the casting of the title role, the smartest thing about The Iron Lady is having most of the film take place in the mind of the senescent Margaret Thatcher: her jumbled memories go some way towards justifying the arrhythmic narrative and make you think twice before complaining that Phyllida Lloyd and the screenwriter Abi Morgan have got their facts wrong. When Margaret informs Denis and Carol she’s going to run for the Conservative Party leadership, her husband reminds her that ‘The Prime Minister’s been very loyal to you, MT’ – even though this conversation surely isn’t taking place while Edward Heath is still in Downing Street. (He left it nearly a year before the leadership election.) In an early scene that happens in the real world, rather than the Thatcher memory, she’s hosting a dinner party – it seems on the day of the Mumbai hotel bombing in November 2008. There’s talk about global terrorism and one of the guests says, ‘The Prime Minister gave a very good speech, I thought’. ‘Yes’, replies his hostess, ‘clever man – rather a smoothie!’ Is she so gaga that she’s forgotten that Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair the previous year?
On the evidence of The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher wasn’t just Britain’s first woman prime minister: she appears to have been the only woman MP in the House of Commons between 1970 and 1990[1]. Is this history rewritten from the perspective of the delusional octogenarian Thatcher? I would bet money the answer to both these questions is no and that this is simply, in the first case, carelessness and, in the second, a feebly feminist comment on the part of the film-makers. But it’s impossible to be sure. Elsewhere, Phyllida Lloyd is more than happy to rely on reality. She stuffs the film with archive footage – rather lazily, although her attempts at historical reconstruction are such a mess that the prevailing reliance on newsreel is something of a relief. Lloyd is remarkably imprecise: when angry proles are (more than once) banging on the window of the prime ministerial car, they might be part of the miners’ strike or the poll tax riots but who cares? It makes the point that Margaret Thatcher stirred people up. The film blunders through edited highlights of the Thatcher years as if they were nothing more than news items: Lloyd and Morgan supply no opportunities for us to get a sense of what Mrs Thatcher thought or felt about winning a General Election (it appears to be just the one) or about giving a speech to conference – even in 1984 after the IRA bomb in Brighton. Most of the Odeon audience were well stricken in years and looked like Thatcher fans but, for those who don’t already have a good grasp of the structure and details of her career, The Iron Lady is likely to be baffling.
Phyllida Lloyd’s second cinema feature isn’t as technically inept as her first, Mamma Mia! There’s a handsome bleakness in the look of the film, photographed by Elliot Davis, which is matched by an uncharacteristically impersonal Thomas Newman score. The large, chilly apartment in which Margaret Thatcher is growing old develops a personality of its own. But Lloyd still looks to be an extraordinarily primitive screen director. It seems unlikely that Airey Neave’s car really was blown up five seconds after he and Margaret Thatcher had said goodnight to each other in the underground car park of the Houses of Parliament and that she ran screaming towards the burning wreckage; even if this actually happened, the scene is so clumsily staged that you don’t believe it. Shots like those of Mrs Thatcher studying maps during the Falklands War are pure cliché: it’s as if Lloyd thinks this must be OK because she’s seen the same shot in other films (as if she’s thereby convincing herself that she too is making a film). When Thatcher sweeps into Number 10 after the Francis of Assisi speech in May 1979, Lloyd records the moment as if to immortalise it but the effect is hollowly bombastic. (The airy movement of the skirt of that blue suit also feminises the figure of Margaret Thatcher – I don’t know if this is intentional but, if so, the emphasis is puzzling.) There are few redeeming features in the direction but one is the opening scene, with a head-scarfed Margaret Thatcher going to the shops for a Daily Telegraph and a pint of milk then trudging home. You think: surely she’s not fallen on such hard times that she has to do this herself? And she doesn’t: it transpires she’s not meant to go out alone and that gives a charge to her being confined to barracks inside her home for the rest of the film. All in all, though, it’s hard to believe Phyllida Lloyd has much future in cinema, especially as The Iron Lady obviously won’t enjoy anything like the international box-office success of Mamma Mia!
Abi Morgan is probably a different matter – she’s now a big name in screenwriting and may well become a bigger one. In the last six months, Morgan’s name has been on the scripts for The Hour, Shame (with Steve McQueen), The Iron Lady and, over the next two Sundays, the BBC’s adaptation of Birdsong. She can write good, sharp dialogue when she’s not trying to make definite points. When she is trying to do that, she has a sledgehammer touch. The young Margaret tells her beau Denis, ‘I don’t want to end my life washing up a teacup’. No prizes for guessing what we see her doing in the closing sequence of the film. David Denby in the New Yorker cites this as an example of the film-makers’ spitefulness towards its subject but I’m not sure it’s not just lack of imagination (and lack of subtlety).
The Iron Lady has attracted criticism because it depicts Margaret Thatcher in the early stages of dementia. While, in this country anyway, these concerns or complaints seem to have been voiced mostly by Conservative politicians past and present, it is a legitimate cause for controversy. Phyllida Lloyd and Abi Morgan have made use of public knowledge that Baroness Thatcher’s mental powers aren’t what they were, in order to imagine the life in the shadows that she now leads – and to contrast this present frailty with her past grasp and grip of political power. Is this fair or moral, when the subject of the film is still alive? I think probably not. I know that if a biopic-with-a-difference like this had been made about Harold Wilson, before his death from Alzheimer’s (and cancer), I would have thought it scandalous – and I assume Margaret Thatcher is still sufficiently compos mentis to understand and be offended by The Iron Lady. I’d be surprised if Phyllida Lloyd and Abi Morgan were natural supporters of Thatcher – I suspect there is a vindictive element in the decision to present her in this way. The passages featuring the elderly Thatcher not only occupy a substantial part of the film (it takes a long time for the conventional biopic to get underway at all) but have a life of their own which the flashbacks lack. The irony is that, by concentrating so much on her decrepitude, Lloyd and Morgan make you feel more sympathetic towards their protagonist. But – in my case anyway – sympathetic only towards the Margaret Thatcher on screen, in this imagining of her old age. This is partly because Meryl Streep’s acting is wonderful and partly because I’m pro-Streep as much as I was anti-Thatcher.
Streep’s Leaderene is never less than formidable but she has a high-strung quality that occasionally verges on the neurotic and is at the expense of Margaret Thatcher’s dread unyieldingness. It’s striking that the iron in Streep’s iron lady comes through more strongly in the geriatric – in the way she talks to her home help (Susan Brown) or her daughter Carol. The suggestion that this is a fundamental part of Thatcher’s character makes it more surprising that it’s less salient in the younger woman. Even so, the neuroticism is fascinating to watch – because it comes through not in moments of relative weakness in Margaret Thatcher’s political career but in the gimlet eyes, in the moments when the exhaustingly controlled voice breaks momentarily into an aggressive bark. David Denby and Stephanie Zacharek both charge Meryl Streep with complicity in what Denby sees as a hatchet job on Thatcher and Zacharek as sucking up to her: their difference of opinion is evidence in itself of Streep’s integrity in concentrating on the character rather than commenting on the famous person she’s playing. Reviews I’ve read suggest that some critics find it hard to be anything like as objective. Denby can’t understand why the film-makers are out to rubbish their subject; like Zacharek, Philip Kemp and Nick James in S&S imply that to treat Margaret Thatcher with any kind of sympathy is a sentimental failure of nerve. Thatcher evidently remains a divisive character – people love or hate her – so The Iron Lady runs a serious risk of pleasing nobody.
I’ve not yet seen the BBC tele-film The Long Walk to Finchley (2008) with Andrea Riseborough as the young Margaret Roberts but its title is sarcastic and the same team’s follow-up, Margaret (2009), was clearly antipathetic to its subject. In Margaret, Lindsay Duncan, a fine small-screen actress, was weak in the title role – whether or not it was her own hostility towards Mrs Thatcher that made her portrait dismissively pallid I can’t say but it’s probably easier for a non-British actress – someone who didn’t live in this country through the 1980s – to play the role sympathetically. There are also points of connection between Margaret Thatcher and Meryl Streep that make the casting particularly apt. There’s something overwhelming and, to many people, alienating about the determination of both women to do whatever it takes to assert themselves. It’s because I couldn’t stand this quality in Mrs Thatcher that I think I got from this film, in a way I never had before, a sense of why my favourite actress gets on the nerves of others.
There are moments in The Iron Lady when you smile at the accuracy of Streep’s mimicry of Thatcher’s voice – especially in the domestic settings, where it seems more unexpected – but this superbly accomplished impersonation means more because it resonates with Margaret Thatcher’s own voice lessons and the self-discipline with which she sustained the way of speaking that she’d been taught. If Meryl Streep’s command of the Thatcher voice is effortful, that enriches her characterisation because a determination to keep up the conscientiously constructed ‘authoritative’ voice (and suppress a native shrillness) was a quality of Margaret Thatcher’s own delivery. It’s no surprise that Streep can easily replicate Thatcher’s mysterious transition from what looked set to be life membership of the petite bourgeoisie to self-convinced regality. Sally said the only element of the performance she didn’t like was when Streep walked quickly but this seemed dead right to me. I remember that, as the years went on, Mrs Thatcher developed an I-mean-business walk, asserting her authority by demanding her entourage literally to keep up with her: although she was clearly the boss, she suggested someone acting bossy in an almost childish way. I wish that Phyllida Lloyd had given Streep more opportunities to explore Thatcher’s character during her political prime but she’s remarkable in the few relatively extended speeches that she is given – especially a cabinet meeting at which Mrs Thatcher humiliates Geoffrey Howe (and which, we’re given to believe, precipitates his resignation). Streep’s vocal rhythms and emotional volatility – and the atmosphere they create in the cabinet room – are electrifying and disorienting. (Phyllida Lloyd misjudges the follow-through, however: Howe’s resignation speech in the Commons is so abbreviated that it’s impossible for someone unfamiliar with this piece of political history to understand how it opened the gates to Michael Heseltine’s leadership bid and Margaret Thatcher’s downfall.)
Meryl Streep isn’t helped by much of the script of The Iron Lady but the make-up people have done a fine job. (They include J Roy Helland, who has been working with her at least since Sophie’s Choice.) Streep’s face as the aged Margaret Thatcher fits and inhabits the prosthetic: as David Edelstein says, she moves her facial muscles like an old lady – and the precision and delicacy of her expressions enhance the realisation of the added flesh. (The pulled-down lower lip on one side of her face is a clear but not overdone reminder of the strokes Thatcher is known to have suffered in recent years.) There’s so much that’s marvellous in Streep’s playing in these sequences. The old woman’s eyes are glaucous and unfocused then a sharpness rises momentarily in them; she presents beautifully expressive attitudes as Baroness Thatcher sits alone and tired at the end of her dinner party or in the consultant’s room, dressed in what Sally calls an idiot gown, with feet dangling between the couch and the floor. Streep’s acting in this scene – the build of her testy, eventually passionate interrogation of the hapless consultant (Michael Maloney) so that she gets the upper hand against the odds – is stupendous: it’s as if the strength of Margaret Thatcher’s resentment of the situation restores her speed of thought and reignites her speech-making powers. In the numerous conversations with the late husband she imagines still to be alive the mother-hen hectoring seems spot on. (‘Blot it – blot it!’ she tells Denis when he cuts himself shaving.) Katharine Hepburn was once quoted as saying that Meryl Streep was her ‘least favourite modern actress’ – ‘”Click, click, click”’ was how Hepburn described the wheels she could hear turning inside Streep’s head. The greatness of Streep’s portrait in this film is in how she shows the wheels turning, or failing to turn, in Margaret Thatcher’s head. Receiving a middle-of-the-night phone call from her beloved, absent son Mark, we watch her summon all her mental energies to pluck from somewhere in her mind the name of her daughter-in-law. In a conversation late on with Carol, who asks if her mother wants someone to come and do her hair, Streep lets you see that Margaret is annoyed by her daughter and that her anger is increasing because she can’t find a way out of it. The irritation is miasmal: when the old woman finds a thought and a solution and exclaims, ‘No – you do it!’ it’s a eureka moment and a catharsis.
In this story of a lone woman’s intimidating personality dominating the many men around her, there’s a presumably inadvertent connection between the political dramatis personae and the casting of the film. As Margaret Thatcher overpowers her cabinet of wets and creeps and the superannuated, so Meryl Streep obliterates the middle-aged-to-elderly British actors in the cast – the likes of Richard E Grant (Heseltine), Nicholas Farrell (hopeless as Airey Neave) and John Sessions (Heath). Michael Pennington isn’t bad as Michael Foot, although Roger Allam is wasted in the meagre role of Gordon Reece. Anthony Head’s role in government in Little Britain makes his casting as Geoffrey Howe potentially amusing but he’s focused on doing the voice (and he does it accurately) to the point of invisibility. Watching Head and Sessions in action here makes you realise the gulf between this level of impression and what Streep is doing.
Jim Broadbent as Denis is obviously a different matter and he doesn’t go for an imitation at all. Some people may find that refreshing but I don’t think it works: Broadbent doesn’t even suggest the social type that Denis Thatcher was – he’s in all respects incongruous. The voice and manner of Harry Lloyd as the young Denis is closer to the mark but Lloyd is physically too young: he and Margaret seem the same age – the real Denis was ten years older. I liked Alexandra Roach as junior Margaret in her scenes with Harry Lloyd but the dramatisation of the girl Margaret’s political education is pretty inept, as she gormlessly watches her revered grocer father (Iain Glen) making speeches in Grantham town hall or wherever. As Carol Thatcher, Olivia Colman has the right jolly eccentricity and there’s a good dynamic between her and Streep in their scenes together: the sense that mother despises daughter, daughter knows it but is going to carry on regardless is palpable. Colman is much less well-served by the make-up department, however – I didn’t understand why Carol Thatcher, who’s hardly an iconic face, needed a prosthetic nose when not much attempt is made to create a Denis lookalike. Colman also seems too young in the latter day scenes (the real Carol Thatcher will be sixty next year).
When I first saw that Meryl Streep was going to play Margaret Thatcher, I thought hopefully that she might win a third Oscar at last. As soon as I read that Phyllida Lloyd was to direct, the doubts about this coming to pass began and remain. When Streep didn’t win for Julie and Julia, it seemed to me that she would never win again. In that film, she was playing, with warmth and charm, a much-loved American personality. The award went instead to Sandra Bullock – someone who’d never been nominated previously, was fifteen years Streep’s junior, and gave a far from compelling performance in The Blind Side. This year the competition is stronger; The Iron Lady (like Julie and Julia) is a poor film except for Streep; and Margaret Thatcher isn’t a feelgood character. Streep is winning prizes this awards season but she isn’t dominating it; Viola Davis in The Help and Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn are in significantly better films; and Davis is playing (extraordinarily well) a heartwarming heroine. Yet again, Streep deserves to win but she just may not be popular enough with the Academy. She has already been nominated and lost more times than any other actor in AMPAS history has had nominations, successful or otherwise. She has won twice from sixteen nominations; next in the league table is Katharine Hepburn, who had a total of twelve nominations, and won four Oscars. Hepburn won each time on the last three occasions that she was nominated but Streep is evidently not a sentimental favourite. She is phenomenally, perhaps forbiddingly talented – and often appears in vehicles which showcase her gifts to the exclusion of nearly everything else. People can give a prize to special effects in isolation but actors need to be part of a richer texture. Whatever the reasons, in the privacy of the equivalent of the polling station, too many Academy voters are inclined to put their cross beside a name other than Meryl Streep[2].
14 January 2012
[1] It’s true that Baroness Young was the only woman ever appointed to a Thatcher cabinet but the likes of Sally Oppenheim and Edwina Currie held junior ministerial posts in her governments.
[2] Afternote: Not too many on this occasion, I’m pleased to say …