Streep's Iron Lady

Just saw Meryl Streep's tour de force portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. It's no wonder that she was nominated for won a Golden Globe.

But as one who saw the international events and political struggles of the Thatcher era from the US, I was left a wee bit disappointed that the story of her life did not give us more context.  Though the Falkland Islands War was nicely done and provided a turning point in the film, little was shown of her relationship with the US and President Reagan, and how they together worked singularly to end the Cold War.  In the movie, the political kerfuffle that cost her the Prime Ministry is blamed on little more than a sharp temper, and not on the actual forces that led her cabinet to abandon her for John Major.

Hollywood would not have made this film told "my" way.  It would be too instructive for our times to see a determined conservative female triumph over doddering blue-blooded liberals who would compromise their own mothers to keep the socialist state of Great Britain and hence their undeserved positions in it. That's a movie Hollywood won't touch.

Yet, rather than tell the Thatcher journey from the outside-in, as I might have wanted to see it, the ingenious screenplay tells the story from the inside-out, through the angst and glory and ghosts of Streep's amazingly deeply richly developed construct of Margaret Thatcher.  The storytelling becomes menacingly complex, too, cast in flashbacks to pivotal moments in history, as we journey gently and gracefully inside Thatcher's soul and wistfully decaying thoughts. And while nobody really knows whether Lady Thatcher's reported dementia feels anything like what we see, Streep does, and her nuanced portrayal of geriatric elegance seen in her Thatcher is so believable and engaging her reality becomes ours.

So if I had hoped to see a story about Margaret Thatcher's life and times, this movie was entirely something else, thanks to Ms. Streep.  The political subtext is actually more powerful done this way, and more acceptable to liberals who might bristle at the thought of canonizing a conservative.  What the story lacked in certain political context it made up for in spades by Streep's ability to give us the full mantle of Thatcher's sheer determination.  Politics aside, watching Streep do Thatcher may be the first time ever that honest liberals will be open and able to understand why a conservative is.  The way Streep adopted her character's motivations was beyond convincing.

It is obvious from Streep's performance that once she committed to her character as Lady Thatcher, she did so so thoroughly that no part of the riveting performance seemed remotely out of step with the rest, an amazing feat given the ages portrayed and the lack of chronological events to drive the character's story.  That the audience knows nothing about Margaret Thatcher's true, current state of mind nor for that matter the early 1980s where the historical action takes place is not important.  A faithful chronicle of events is not what this film is about, but it is a life's struggles and its denouement told from the inside out.