Nobody divides popular opinion quite like former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. To some she is the nation’s saviour, who triumphed in the Cold War and saved the country from assorted lefties, Argentineans and trade unions, reversing decades of national decline. To others, her selfish and greedy policies wrecked our health service, schools and left a legacy of rising unemployment and crime from which we’ve never recovered.
Perhaps for this reason, large sections of this film avoid politics completely, instead focusing on the octogenarian Thatcher of today as she copes with the onset of old age, senility and comes to terms with the death of her beloved Denis (Jim Broadbent).
Streep is firmly in the Oscar class as the elderly Thatcher and Broadbent is great, if perhaps a lot more jolly and fun filled than one imagines the real Denis to have been. But it’s a shame that so much time is devoted to imagined ideas about the state of Thatcher’s mind, as the flashbacks (when they do finally get going) have so much material to include. We do, however, get a convincing sense of how Thatcher (initially played by Alexandra Roach) rises up from her lowly Grantham origins through the snooty smoky male dominated Westminster world, surprising everyone including apparently herself by eventually becoming the first woman Prime Minister.
A few bits don’t ring true: the scenes of a happy Thatcher family home life seem somewhat idealised (although Olivia Colman is great as daughter “Cawol) and a sequence where the Lady suddenly reveals to her Cabinet that she knows the price of Lurpak seems rather bizarre.
Inevitably, as this is a Thatcher biopic most of the key events of her tenure are viewed entirely from her own perspective. We see the Falklands War and the Miner’s Strike (though for some reason the Strike not the war occurs first in this version). However her opponents are never presented as being reasonable: they are either toffee nosed wets or ugly hairy protesting lefties. Only towards the end, when Thatcher’s relentless single mindedness on issues like the disastrous Poll Tax and her bullying of unlikely nemesis Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head) unwittingly precipitates her downfall, does the screenplay lose sympathy with its subject. And even then it’s implied these failings could be an early manifestation of her illness.
But ultimately, while the strange perspective does effectively undermine the film, it’s hard not to be moved by Streep’s touching performance as a lioness in the winter of her life.
Overall Verdict: A flawed biopic but Streep deserves an Oscar for her performance. And at least the film doesn’t go on and on.
Reviewer: Chris Hallam