Iron Lady

So versatile, talented and effective is Meryl Streep, it's hard to imagine anyone, including the redoubtable Margaret Thatcher, wanting someone else to portray them in a movie.

Streep is indisputably the best living actress for the past 30 years – and arguably one of the best, if not the best, in cinema history. So much so you start thinking she could play famous men better than most male actors.

Indeed, so consistently skilful and wonderful have been her performances – and in so many eclectic roles and genres of film – that it's easy to casually just say that each is yet another "Meryl Streep movie".

Certainly, that's what The Iron Lady is. While Alexandra Roach plays Thatcher as a young woman, it's when Streep is on screen that this movie becomes so much better than it actually is.

It's not the first time Streep has played a real-life woman. Among her many indelible performances are ones in which she portrayed Julia Child (Julie and Julia), Susan Orlean (Adaptation), Lindy Chamberlain (Evil Angels), Karen Silkwood (Silkwood) and Karen Blixen (Out of Africa) – but none of them as famous and powerful as Margaret Thatcher.

Streep again shows her uncanny ability for impersonation when playing Thatcher in her prime. Thatcher's look, demeanour and speaking style have all been studied, assimilated and replicated on screen.

But where Streep displays her acting prowess is more in playing a Thatcher we are less familiar with – an octogenarian suffering from bouts of dementia and hallucination.

While the makeup to transform Streep into an elderly Thatcher is superb, it's within this aged mask that Streep uses her eyes, nuances of expression, tilts of head and voice inflections to depict a geriatric woman struggling to be the person she once was and having to resort to memory to keep that woman alive in her mind.

Director Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) and screenwriter Abi Morgan use this old Thatcher – the year is 2009, when Thatcher was 84, just before her portrait was unveiled in 10 Downing St – as a springboard from which to leap back into her past.

In flashbacks Thatcher recalls her influential father (Iain Glen), a grocer and mayor who instilled within her what would become the fundamentals of her political convictions and personal beliefs, and her initial political forays during which she met and married Denis Thatcher (Harry Lloyd).

t might seem from the film that she was the only female Conservative MP when elected in 1979 but she was actually one of eight Conservatives and one of 19 woman MPs in Parliament overall. However, she became the first, and so far only, woman British prime minister and the first woman leader of a Western country. Her nearly 12 years in the office is the longest of any British prime minister in the 20th century.

In skipping-stone style the movie skims across her clashes with labour unions, the closure of coalmines, IRA bombings (including her close call in a Brighton hotel), the Falklands war and her eventual resignation as party leader when the so-called "iron lady" (a sobriquet from the Russians) learned she was not immune to the rust of power.

As well, the screenplay touches on her private life – how her ambition and determination often was at the expense of her family and husband – and offers snippets of her philosophy.

But much of the movie is like watching a highlights reel of Thatcher's life – and, as such, it lacks dramatic force and offers no new insights. Instead, Lloyd and Morgan attempt to find poignancy in her frailty.

It's an approach which eventually becomes overplayed – and you might wish the film had devoted more time to what made Thatcher tick than to depicting a woman grown feeble and lonely.

Yet throughout it all Streep is riveting and marvellous. Whatever personal politics moviegoers have shouldn't affect their admiration for Streep's performance.

By the end you can almost hear another collective groan emanating from possible Academy Award best actress nominees as Streep deservedly will gain her 17th Oscar nomination and be the favourite to garner her third win.

Source: Stuff.co.nz