United Kingdom: Does Streep’s film do Thatcher justice?

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Meryl Streep makes an eerily perfect Margaret Thatcher, said Jonathan Romney in the London Independent. In the new film The Iron Lady, Streep’s “uncanny impersonation” captures Thatcher at multiple stages in her career. The ambitious cabinet minister is there, with those “flashes of anxiety hovering around the front teeth, the micro-flickers of the eyes.” And in a scene where the prime minister berates an underling, Streep “reveals the patronizing contempt and feral punitiveness that made Thatcher so chilling.” Most imaginatively, the film shows Thatcher as she is today, “a fragile old woman with Alzheimer’s, fixated on the past.” It humanizes her and lends a King Lear majesty to the narrative: The once-mighty ruler struggles with the loss of loved ones and ultimately the loss of self.

How unspeakably humiliating for poor Lady Thatcher, said Matthew Bond in the Mail on Sunday. The film’s depiction of her as a doddering crone is “beyond cruel.” As if to punish her for her policies, the film dwells relentlessly on “the indignities of Thatcher’s old age.” We see her in a hospital gown, sometimes confused or even delusional, drinking too much. In one excruciating scene, she is “sprawled in an undignified heap on the floor,” rifling through the clothes of her dead husband. It would be different if she were long dead, for then she would be a historical figure—but Thatcher is still very much alive, and this treatment is simply disrespectful. Can you imagine “if a British actor had depicted Ronald Reagan in this way when the American president was still alive but suffering from Alzheimer’s?” The Americans would have been apoplectic.

It’s not the depiction of Thatcher’s decline that bothers me, said David Sexton in the Evening Standard, so much as the lack of politics in the film. It is structured not as a documentary or even a biopic of the prime minister, but more as a universal tragedy of aging. But the filmmaker achieves this lofty aim “at the cost of almost completely blanking out Thatcher’s political importance, which is equally unsatisfactory whether you despise or revere her.” It’s not a tale of a right-winger who privatized industries, threw thousands out of work, and destroyed the power of unions. Instead, it’s a story of a woman who succeeded in a man’s world. The approach “brilliantly snookers all those who want to hate her,” for “how can any feminist be against the story shown here?”

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Those who lived it certainly can, said the Belfast Telegraph. The film makes scant allusion to Thatcher’s most damaging legacies. Through her imposition of laissez-faire policies, she “created a culture of greed in British society, where the yuppies creamed off all the wealth and the poor were virtually downtrodden.” So perhaps it’s fitting that the film should be so controversial, said The Economist. It will divide audiences—“as its heroine did.”