THE IRON LADY directed by Phyllida Lloyd (UK, 2011)
The Iron Lady is a film about one of the most significant (and hated) political figures of the 20th century but is practically devoid on any political content. It tells you more about the state of dementia than it does about the state of Britain in the 1990s.
That the movie should end up as little more than a vehicle for Meryl Streep is perhaps only fitting since , for Margaret Thatcher, character is all.
Thatcher stands as the epitome of conviction politics but there is no excuse for ignoring the human consequences of her regime as though they were incidental details. We see scenes of the coalminers’ strike, the Falklands war, the hunger strikers in Northern Ireland and finally the poll tax riots but you never get any understanding of what really drove her to stick so unwavering to her cynical beliefs on any of these issues. Continue reading
Once, in my former life as a pen-pushing civil servant in North London, a typist at the office where I worked had, what with hindsight, must have been a nervous breakdown. She was a polite, quietly spoken and well turned out middle-aged woman who, one morning, was restrained in the high street in front of the office where she had been shouting and screaming at passers-by.
