Meryl Streep Plays Margaret Thatcher

It couldn’t have been easy making this movie. So many people constitute the young audience and they might know about Princess Di, the Queen of England and the royal wedding, but who among them cares that bringing a female Prime Minister back to life could be so edifying. It couldn’t have been easy for an actress to play someone some of us remember so well.  Someone who has so impressed and influenced our times. (The last time I actually saw Prime Minister  Margaret  Thatcher she was being escorted up the aisle at the National Cathedral after President Reagan’s funeral! She’d had a stroke but she was still “Somebody!” and she’d been given the highest American honor, The Presidential Medal of Freedom.) And Meryl Streep brings her back here in all her vaunted ambition, her irritation with trivial  domestic life, her articulate arguments against all odds, her military patriotism, her staunch conservative beliefs and her not-so-grand political ouster and the onset of uselessness and encroaching old age. So at first we have the young, somewhat insecure but determined Maggie Roberts who, in World War II,  aspires to be something other than the woman in the kitchen. (This youthful role is played by a fine young actress named Alexandra Roach, but even she must be daunted when her character begins to be portrayed by Meryl Streep.) We get all versions of Maggie – young, sexily middle aged, defeated with head held high, growing frail  -- in her happy courtship and marriage,  in her climb into the all-male  House of Commons, in  her handsome physical makeover. There she is  winning elections, facing down misogynistic enemies foreign and domestic, defending the Falklands War by comparing it to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, becoming in office a controlling,  imperious,  unrelenting high-handed scold and at last, losing her position as Prime Minister. 

She also loses her devoted husband, Denis, to the cosmos. He is the great, the almost, literally divine actor Jim Broadbent, who here is both comic relief and charm personified.  But Maggie becomes old, before our very eyes; she begins to limp, more and more slowly rising from chairs, moving tentatively  among the furniture, growing into a feeling of uselessness, savagely protesting to doctors and well-meaning domestic help that she’s all right, offering opinions about disgusting people who have problems with “feelings”  instead of simply doing something useful. She turns forgetful and looks for her beloved but irritating Denis. But he has died and there are all his suits, shirts and shoes to be rid of.  I have never seen a performer as young as Miss Streep play at the vagaries of growing old, having trouble rising, walking, forgetful and fighting it every step of the way as in this very fine film. But who knows how Meryl Streep ,a sheer genius actor, gets into the heads and psyches and make-ups of other people so that she is more real than the subject?  In person, Meryl seems normal and  down-to-earth but she has to be a witch to do what she does impersonating a grand assortment of others.

At the screening I saw, producer Harvey Weinstein noted that the British hated this movie from the get-go without even seeing it. He remarked in self-deprecation that he was giving actress Streep a chance. He knew he was a monster; or he was a hero. (I vote for the latter, unequivocally.  What would movie-lovers do without Harvey?) You will love Margaret Thatcher submitting to a new hairdo, taking voice lessons and surrendering her hats.  You’ll recognize her bowing to advice in order to win, pining over her children who are as disappointing to her as her loyal husband seems at times. You will never forget her in this role; impossibly beautiful, glamorous and chic in parts of it – like where she is dancing with Reagan celebrating the Cold War's end or departing her high office with tears glimmering behind her eyes and a slight smile.. This film is also a recent, diverting and exciting replay of modern  British history – with thrills aplenty from the Nazi blitz to the IRA terrorists to the bombing of  No. 10 Downing St. to the Falklands war.  It has suspense even when we know that above all, Maggie Thatcher survived.  And she survived to discover that mere survival isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There is plenty of conservative-liberal argument reminding one of today.  A distinct sense of loss pervades this film. But even if one did not exactly approve of Mrs. Thatcher as P.M., one has to approve of her guts! She operated from the courage of convictions and no Prime Minister following her has begun to reach her heights.

This is really a great movie. I can’t think of anything released recently or coming on the scene that can stand up to it. And certainly no one will stand up to Meryl Streep’s greatest performance as a beautiful competitor, a winner and loser, who needed to be left alone with her innate timing and grandeur.  She is the woman  some have called the greatest Prime Minister since Winston Churchill (and the only woman England ever exalted or permitted to rise as PM.)   One little carp. “The Iron Lady” is about 15 minutes too long,  toward the end.  I’d have liked an extension for more of Maggie’s fight, more of her kicking against the pricks as Shakespeare wrote, more about what exactly she was missing while  sidelined.  And I’d have liked a little less of Maggie pathetic, confused, muddled and seemingly finished. It’s no secret that the the great public washes its hands of its heroes.  But Meryl  plays Maggie as a real hero and they should have paid attention.  Liz Smith is a native-born Texan who used to go to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies during the Depression and yearn for the bright lights of Broadway. She arrived in New York in 1949 with $50 to her name and no ticket home. She had finally found the center of things and had no choice but to succeed. As the star columnist of the New York "Daily News," she created an overnight sensation. Then there was her concurrent 11-year stint on NBC-TV's "Live At Five." Her daily column can now be read on www.wowowow.com, in "Daily Variety" and in syndication.