THE IRON LADY: caution! fine acting may induce ill-advised nostalgia

For those of us Brits who came to political consciousness in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher was and is an incredibly polarising figure. You either loved her or hated her. Indifference was not an option.

After 11 and a half years in power, her sudden demise as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party was mourned by few and she rapidly faded from public view. Now, 21 years after her final departure from 10 Downing Street it's easy to forget she's still with us. The infrequent sightings of this increasingly frail old lady are reminders of what feels like the dim distant past - not quite when dinosaurs roamed the Earth but pretty close.
So it was that I found myself feeling almost nostalgic for the Thatcher years as THE IRON LADY stirred memories that had long lain dormant. And it was a disturbing sensation because there's really nothing to feel nostalgic about. Politically the 1980s were less of a mess than the 70s had been but they are still not a decade I have a hankering to return to.
I blame this misplaced yearning on the impressive job that director Phyllida Lloyd ('Mamma Mia!') has done in recreating the events and personalities of the era and, in particular, on Meryl Streep's eerily spot-on impression of Mrs T herself. Perhaps impression is not quite the right word because Ms Streep doesn't simply pretend to be THE IRON LADY, she is the woman who struck fear into the hearts of Britain's friends and foes alike and became Ronald Reagan's soul mate. It's a stunning performance particularly given that she had to master a convincing British accent in addition to all of Mrs T's mannerisms and speech patterns. Streep's already picked up the BAFTA and the Golden Globe for Best Actress, and next weekend she could well add the Oscar to that haul.
Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher also deserves praise and the fact that he's not received multiple nominations is a reflection on the judgment of the nominating committees rather than the quality of his performance.

But while Streep and Broadbent are magnificent the film itself is not. Given the rich seam of material it had to mine it's disappointingly shallow. An hour and forty five minutes is totally inadequate to do justice to the scope of the subject matter, and so the story jumps around from Margaret's youth to her old age (where it spends entirely too much time), then back to her political beginnings and forward to her arrival as Britain's first female Prime Minister. Not only is that confusing if you're not familiar with British political history, but it's not enough time to focus on anything in any depth, and her 11 and a half years as PM get particularly short shrift.
There's no sense of the seismic shift in British society brought about by Thatcher's policies during the 1980s. Stock footage of police clashing with demonstrators at some undefined protest stands in for the long running battles with the unions, the opposition to cruise missiles and every other confrontation between Thatcher's government and various sectors of the electorate (and there were a lot of them!).
What we're left with is more of a sketch of her life rather than a biopic. Anyone coming to this film hoping to find out just what it was that Mrs Thatcher achieved which makes her worthy of a big budget movie starring Meryl Streep is likely to leave very little the wiser.