The Iron Lady shows signs of metal fatigue
I finally got to see this much hyped film recently. It is undeniably an interesting and even an intriguing film, though very far from being a great or even an outstanding one. I say this because whilst it undoubtedly leaves a deep impression on the mind and features a very remarkable performance from Meryl Streep as the eponymous ferrous female, the film has too many deep and significant flaws.
As is well known the film depicts the now aged and infirm Lady Thatcher as the framing device within which we see her development as a person and as a politician. Streep’s performance has not been over praised. It is the most extraordinary portrayal of a real and living person that I have ever seen, almost eerily so. As the aged Thatcher it is at times hard to believe that we are not watching the real person, so brilliant is her impersonation, with its mixture of stridency and dithering, and as the younger, prime-of-life Thatcher, she is equally impressive, conveying the brisk, bustling authority and unflinching certainty. This no mere impression a la Rory Bremner, Jon Culshaw, or Ronnie Ancona, but rather the production of a believable individual by inhabiting that person’s universe. The once iron lady is now suffering a severe case of metal fatigue, and her hold on rationality is uncertain, hard-headed commonsense flickering on and off like a torch with a dodgy battery, as she fights off the attentions of her now dead husband. The propriety of this approach to the portrayal of a still-living person has of course been questioned, but it is a compelling, though hackneyed narrative device.
But whilst the performances are outstanding the problem with the film really lies with its politics, and the extreme difficulty of trying to encapsulate a long and tempestuous premiership within the confines of a ninety minute film. Clearly the film-makers (director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan who wrote The Hour) had decided not to focus on any single aspect of the Thatcher premiership such as the miners strike, the Falklands War, or the Brighton hotel bombing, as one might have imagined that they would do, and instead we get a panorama of her years in power, ranging from industrial strife, to the Falklands, to Cabinet arguments over economic policy, to Europe, the Brighton bombings and the IRA, the Cold War, etc, etc. You name it and it is there, briefly covered and mainly in the form of contemporary archival news footage, with perhaps the odd little scene involving Thatcher and a collection of ministers, or a House of Commons scene. This is okay as a sketch of her time in office, but it fails to get to grips with the core of her political beliefs and the reasons why her premiership was so intensely controversial. Did her government transform the country and was this for better or worse? These are the questions that need to be addressed, but aren’t really, and cannot really be in a ninety minute film.
The political scenes are reasonably well handled, though often not totally convincing. There is the usual rather stodgy depiction of the Commons as a bear garden stuffed with braying backbench MPs, though as so often its authenticity is undercut by making it a little too homogeneous in composition, mannerisms and behaviour. In particular literally every singly Tory MP is male, whereas in reality there was, even then, a smattering of females on the backbenches (on both sides), and it has apparently been admitted by the film-makers that this was done deliberately so as to emphasise how she stood out in sharp relief from the broad mass of her party by virtue of her “femaleness”. It may be an effective dramatic device, but it is factually incorrect and therefore irritating to a political anorak such as myself. Also the Cabinet scenes, or scenes of meetings with ministers, are moderately convincing but the line-up is curiously selective. We get a lot of Sir Geoffrey Howe, for example, right through the premiership, but little of some other equally prominent Cabinet members. In particular I failed to spot Willie Whitelaw at all, which is an extraordinary omission given not only that he was deputy prime minister, and the man she defeated for the leadership but also of vital importance to the success of her premiership, especially in its early days when relations with much of the party was rocky to say the least. He was the chief representative of the “wets” in the party, and a man whose continued loyalty was vital for her secure continuance of backbench support. As she famously said, in an inadvertent witticism, “Every prime minister needs a Willy”. Others too are strangely AWOL, unless I missed them in the multiplicity of characters who appear, such as key acolyte Norman Tebbit, Chancellor Nigel Lawson and, most extraordinary of all the absences (again unless I missed him), Sir Keith Joseph, her chief political mentor. There is very little evidence of any leading Labour Party figures either, with just Michael Foot appearing in one lengthy Commons scene, but where was Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock or numerous others? This may have been because there wasn’t the time or space to accommodate every leading figure – the cast after all changed greatly over the course of her eleven year premiership - but may be because of the political ignorance of the filmmakers, unaware of the key significance of certain politicians to Thatcher’s political development. Maybe they were there but relatively inconspicuous with Howe chosen, for some reason, to stand in as the permanent representative of her Cabinet, and portrayed as rather feeble and pusillanimous.
If so, it is not only a failing regarding authenticity but indicative of the film’s total failure to grapple with the hard politics of the times. Where were the arguments over economic policy, tax and spending, privatisation, monetarism, inflation, etc? Admittedly these are hard concepts to deal with in a ninety minute film, and one starts to wish for a lengthier treatment which only television can give. Indeed such treatment has been given in such BBC offerings as “Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley” (2008), directed by Niall MacCormick, written by Tony Saint and starring Andrea Riseborough, dealing mainly with her rise, and “Margaret” (2009), directed by James Kent, written by Richard Cottan and starring Lindsay Duncan, about her fall. Admittedly the former looks and sounds a bit like “Carry On Up The Conservative Party”, but never mind. Or indeed the “Falklands Play” (2002), directed by Michael Samuels and written by Ian Curteis, where she is portrayed very effectively, though without any attempt at physical impersonation, by Patricia Hodge, dealing with a single decisive issue of her career in great depth and providing a very effective drama about what was arguably the turning point of her premiership.
There are other liberties too. Mrs Thatcher was certainly not present at the murder by car bomb of her mentor Airey Neave, and to show her rushing to him after his death is a dramatic liberty much too far and more in keeping with the conventions of a Hollywood blockbuster than a serious British film dealing with real-life events. It would have been just as effective, and in keeping with the truth, to have shown her horrified reaction on camera when she was informed of his death during the course of the 1979 election campaign. Even Mrs Thatcher did not wear a hat in the chamber of the Commons, where headgear is strictly prohibited. Another error, and one that I feel may be inadvertent, unlike the aforementioned, is her “makeover session” with Gordon Reece and Neave, which did not take place until she was well into her spell as Leader of the Opposition, and not before her election to the leadership as the film suggests. And what of the odd bit of dialogue in this scene where, as she prepares for her leadership bid against Heath, she is saying to Reece and Neave that she did not imagine that she would ever be prime minister! Why then was she standing for the leadership? Did she envisage leading the Tories to electoral defeat if she gained the leadership? This makes no sense politically or dramatically, and is at odds with the whole tenor of the film, which correctly portrays her as utterly convinced of her right, duty and capacity to lead the country.
There are also the obligatory series of vignettes of her early life, her adolescence, her relationship with her parents; very warm and intimate with her revered father, the legendary Alderman Roberts, and a tad distant with her mother, and mocked by schoolmates for being a swat. Then we follow her entry into politics as the very young Conservative candidate for Dartford, and her meeting with the young Denis Thatcher and his evident infatuation with her. We are invited to believe that she was patronised and looked down upon by the, then, patrician and male party grandees, sparking her determination to succeed in spite of their scorn. Again, it is debatable as to how true a representation this is of Tory internal politics at the time. The fact remains that she was nominated as Tory candidate for Dartford in 1951, at the age of twenty-five and then for the safe Tory seat of Finchley for the 1959 general election, at the age of thirty-four or younger, so the prejudice in Tory circles against a petit bourgeois woman cannot have been that great. Denis is portrayed in these early scenes as a bit of a buffoon, and then again as the spectre haunting Margaret in old age as a tiresome prankster. This is at odds with what we know of the tough, hard-headed, and very right-wing businessman we know him to have been.
There are affecting scenes as we see the aged Margaret pore over home recordings of her time playing with the children, Carol and Mark, as she symbolically runs the film backwards, murmuring about how “they grow up so fast”. We see the old lady fight her way back to sanity with the help of daughter Carol (well played in a low key by Olivia Coleman), ultimately dismissing the spectre of Denis, getting rid of his clothes, a leitmotif of the film, and struggling to regain her grip on reality, a battle we are invited to understand she wins.
This is an extraordinary take on a remarkable life, but then the scenes of her dotage could in a sense be anyone’s, so why pick on her?
A beguiling but unsatisfactory film.
19th March 2012
