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| IRON LADY, THE (2011)
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SBD Star Rating:
by Chiara Adorno
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The Iron Lady has the critics evenly divided, with the always incredible Meryl Streep's intimate portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, the first and only female Prime Minister of the UK. The film spans close to two decades after Thatcher has left office, recounting her days as PM in flashback. What we see mostly is an old woman with advancing Alzheimer's disease, interspersed, all too few, with the most memorable moments of her past.James Berardinelli in Reelviews laments rather comically, "The most disappointing aspect of The Iron Lady is that some of the most memorable hallmarks of Thatcher's time in power are glossed over. The Falklands War is covered at warp speed. An IRA attempt on her life gets a couple of minutes. Her relationship with U.S. President Ronald Reagan is confined to a brief scene of them dancing at an official function. By spending so much time with Thatcher in her dotage, the movie becomes limited in its ability to tell the story of her earlier years in a convincing, compelling fashion. One can get a better sense of her importance to recent history by reading her Wikipedia entry." Dana Stevens Salon identifies similarities she's noted by screenwriter Abi Morgan, who also co-wrote the film, Shame, stating, "Both feature a driven, single-minded protagonist who manages to impress us as complex and larger-than-life thanks to the sheer force of personality of the actor playing him or her. And both films seem to take place in a context so thin, it’s as if their bullheaded main characters — Shame’s self-loathing poon hound and The Iron Lady’s indestructible battle-ax — were acting against a painted backdrop....Her [Morgan] film falls, with a consistency that starts to seem willful, into every biopic sandtrap. There are secondary characters who seem to exist only as exposition-delivery devices; historical montages assembled from TV news footage; and flashback reveries triggered by a character gazing at a framed photograph (an image that’s the visual equivalent of hearing harp arpeggios on the soundtrack.).... If it weren't for Streep, The Iron Lady would be unwatchable." Ouch. Peter Bradshaw The Guardian opines, "Margaret is played with cunning and gusto by Meryl Streep, and it is a pious critical convention to praise performances like these on the grounds that they go beyond mere impersonation.... Basically, this is a defanged, declawed, depoliticised Margaret Thatcher, whom we are invited to admire on the feeble grounds that she is tougher and gutsier than the men." Peter Rainer The Christian Science Monitor submits, "Streep is, as always, pitch perfect. Much like her Julia Child in Julie and Julia she goes way beyond impersonation. But even Streep can’t single-handedly give depth and nuance to a movie so briskly content with skimming surfaces both political and psychological." |
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