Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.
I don’t really know where to come at a film like The Iron Lady. It is, as expected, well made. It features the expected great performances from Meryl Streep and Jim Broadbent. I’d be lying if I called myself a fan of the film’s subject Margaret Thatcher, though. The Iron Lady is not a warts-removed biopic, but it does seem to depict her as someone who should be more pitied than anything else. I didn’t think that the film would end up vilifying her, and that’s not what I expected to see. But is pity really the right emotion we should have?
The film takes place in more or less the present day, or at least the present day of Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) at the time of the film. By 2011, she had become an old woman, something of a punchline for particular types of aggressive policies in British government, and widowed. Those not familiar with her personal history would not know that last point right away, because her husband Dennis (Jim Broadbent) is materially present in the present of the film. It’s only later that we realize that Margaret is having something akin to a waking hallucination of her husband that we begin to understand her somewhat fragile mental state.
