The Iron Lady

In recent years we’ve had films about George W. Bush and the Queen, TV films about Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gordon Brown and a couple of TV films about Margaret Thatcher. Now it’s Mrs T’s turn for the cinematic treatment in the Iron Lady.


Here we’re presented initially with Margaret Thatcher’s hinterland as she begins to face life without her husband. Through this she remembers her premiership and the highs and lows of her career. These of course include the Brighton bomb, the Falklands war and admonishing Geoffrey Howe in the Cabinet Room.

Meryl Streep does a decent enough job impersonation of Thatcher in her pomp and as a frail old woman in her dotage. I was slightly irritated by the little noises she kept on making throughout the film, I suppose that’s acting. Olivia Coleman sounded like Carol Thatcher but her prosthetics made her look neither like herself or Ms Thatcher. Jim Broadbent, as ever, gives an honest performance as Denis Thatcher. The interplay between him and Streep was one of the successes of the film; they did well to portray the genuine affection between the couple.

I found the film though to be very gossipy and made with very broad strokes. There could have been a bit more exploration to her political ideology. Was it all based on her father being a shopkeeper and her being a housewife, I think not. All of the flashbacks, as it were, concentrated on personality and nothing deeper at all. In the film Geoffrey Howe resigned because of the aforementioned humiliation, I think there was more to it than that. There was no mention of Westland at all, when Thatcher had her resignation letter in her handbag apparently. The only leader of the Opposition that seemed to be featured in her premiership was Michael Foot, a small foot note I’m sure.

The film is designed to make people feel sorry for this sad old woman who used to be Prime Minister. We’re shown that she misses her husband and misses being Prime Minister. At the beginning of the film she’s shocked to find that a pint of milk is 49p, she prided herself, when PM, on knowing how much a pint of milk, it proving in her mind that she was in touch. The major irony of the film is of course that it’s called The Iron Lady, and we’re quickly apprised of the fact that she’s no longer that.