Review By: Priya Chaudhary
Bollywood Aaina Business Rating: 2 / 5 (Two)
Watch or Not?: Watch it for Meryl Streep’s wonderful performance.
Cast: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Alexandra Roach, Harry Lloyd.
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Bollywood Aaina Verdict: The Iron Lady will do average business in India, that too mainly due to Streep’s Oscar win.
The Iron Lady is a film about Britain’s longest-serving prime minister, who happened to be a woman, and a controversial one at that.
It begins somewhere in the late 2000s with the octogenarian Margaret Thatcher as a benign old woman bumbling about in a grocery store. As it turns out, the strong-willed lady gave her guards the slip to buy milk.
“If I can’t go out to buy a pint of milk then what is the world coming to,” she later tells her husband Denis Thatcher (Broadbent). This would not be unusual had her affable businessman husband not been dead since 2003.
While she refuses to think there is anything wrong with her because she links primary thoughts to one’s actions, character, and destiny, we see that she is a prisoner of the haunting reflections that come with age. Her wandering mind spurred by household memorabilia ushers us back to her golden years.
The film traces her origins from the young daughter of a grocer, who came out of the German blitz during World War II to receive a diploma from Oxford, become an MP, the education secretary, and ultimately the leader of the British government. “Beyond the cooking and the cleaning and the children, one’s life must mean more than that — I cannot die washing up a tea cup,” a younger version of herself stipulates before accepting Denis’s hand in marriage.
However, once in power, she emerges as a polarising figure, her premiership rocked by recession, unemployment, and strikes (and the occasional terror strike) — more or less brought about by her ruthless, admittedly unpopular economic policies that are averse to socialism.
The film, like an advertisement for a greatest hits album of a singer, flits back and forth through major events that saw her at the helm of state affairs. With her nature constantly explored, every action is more or less justified, and her tendency to stick to her guns is greatly lauded.
The character-driven screenplay weakness lies in better conveying how the Iron Lady’s iron fist influenced society at large. (However, while it may seem that Thatcher’s bullying nature is often glossed over, Denis, in one scene, decries her insufferable ways.) Often, the portrayal of dissent to her controversial decisions is limited to scenes of braying MPs in the House of Commons, her car being gherroed and horse-riding bobbies laying down the baton on riotous protestors (to punk music, of course). Her culpability for the loss of life in both the Argentine and English sides in the Falklands War (after which her popularity skyrocketed) is diminished with a scene of her writing the families: “As the only prime minister in the history of our country who is also a mother with a son of my own, I can imagine your agony, and your grief.”
Meryl Streep, with every uncanny physical gesture and verbal articulation, leaves nothing wanting in her portrayal of Thatcher. Broadbent, as her husband or the memory of him rather, offers brilliant well-timed comic relief as the irreverent Denis.
The Iron Lady is a well-acted borderline hagiography of a historical figure called everything from a milk-snatcher (for scrapping freemilk to schools) to a war-monger. Catch it for the performances rather than the larger story of a self-determined woman held her own in the face of chauvinism and perceived ineptness to make something of herself even if she was a teensy-weensy bit flawed.
Bollywood Aaina Business Rating: 2 / 5 (Two)
Watch or Not?: Watch it for Meryl Streep’s wonderful performance.
Cast: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Alexandra Roach, Harry Lloyd.
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Bollywood Aaina Verdict: The Iron Lady will do average business in India, that too mainly due to Streep’s Oscar win.
The Iron Lady is a film about Britain’s longest-serving prime minister, who happened to be a woman, and a controversial one at that.
It begins somewhere in the late 2000s with the octogenarian Margaret Thatcher as a benign old woman bumbling about in a grocery store. As it turns out, the strong-willed lady gave her guards the slip to buy milk.
“If I can’t go out to buy a pint of milk then what is the world coming to,” she later tells her husband Denis Thatcher (Broadbent). This would not be unusual had her affable businessman husband not been dead since 2003.
While she refuses to think there is anything wrong with her because she links primary thoughts to one’s actions, character, and destiny, we see that she is a prisoner of the haunting reflections that come with age. Her wandering mind spurred by household memorabilia ushers us back to her golden years.
The film traces her origins from the young daughter of a grocer, who came out of the German blitz during World War II to receive a diploma from Oxford, become an MP, the education secretary, and ultimately the leader of the British government. “Beyond the cooking and the cleaning and the children, one’s life must mean more than that — I cannot die washing up a tea cup,” a younger version of herself stipulates before accepting Denis’s hand in marriage.
However, once in power, she emerges as a polarising figure, her premiership rocked by recession, unemployment, and strikes (and the occasional terror strike) — more or less brought about by her ruthless, admittedly unpopular economic policies that are averse to socialism.
The film, like an advertisement for a greatest hits album of a singer, flits back and forth through major events that saw her at the helm of state affairs. With her nature constantly explored, every action is more or less justified, and her tendency to stick to her guns is greatly lauded.
The character-driven screenplay weakness lies in better conveying how the Iron Lady’s iron fist influenced society at large. (However, while it may seem that Thatcher’s bullying nature is often glossed over, Denis, in one scene, decries her insufferable ways.) Often, the portrayal of dissent to her controversial decisions is limited to scenes of braying MPs in the House of Commons, her car being gherroed and horse-riding bobbies laying down the baton on riotous protestors (to punk music, of course). Her culpability for the loss of life in both the Argentine and English sides in the Falklands War (after which her popularity skyrocketed) is diminished with a scene of her writing the families: “As the only prime minister in the history of our country who is also a mother with a son of my own, I can imagine your agony, and your grief.”
Meryl Streep, with every uncanny physical gesture and verbal articulation, leaves nothing wanting in her portrayal of Thatcher. Broadbent, as her husband or the memory of him rather, offers brilliant well-timed comic relief as the irreverent Denis.
The Iron Lady is a well-acted borderline hagiography of a historical figure called everything from a milk-snatcher (for scrapping freemilk to schools) to a war-monger. Catch it for the performances rather than the larger story of a self-determined woman held her own in the face of chauvinism and perceived ineptness to make something of herself even if she was a teensy-weensy bit flawed.
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