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The Iron Lady - Movie Review

Review by charlotteobserver.com

From the moment her name and the subject of her next film were announced, you knew Meryl Streep’s performance as/impersonation of Margaret Thatcher had Oscar written all over it. And true to form, the Academy might as well emboss her name on the statuette now.

It’s an uncanny turn by the screen’s greatest actress, an acting job with towering bombast and marvelous subtlety. She nailed the look, the tone, the speech patterns, the little snap of the head of the imperious British prime minister. Bloody brilliant.

Review by Detroit News

And while it’s true star Meryl Streep can leap tall buildings in a single bound, run faster than a speeding bullet and is more powerful than a locomotive, even she can’t bring coherency or depth to this scattered and somewhat mean-spirited biography.

The term biography applies loosely here, since about a third of the film takes place in the modern day, as Thatcher, suffering from dementia, shuffles about her home, talking to her dead husband (Jim Broadbent). It’s hard to imagine screenwriter Abi Morgan or director Phyllida Lloyd somehow got transcripts of these unlikely conversations.

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Review by sfgate.com

It’s possible, only because anything is possible, that in the distant future people will decide they don’t much like Meryl Streep. But I predict an opposite scenario, that someday people will look back on the movies that Streep keeps making every year or so – and they’ll watch these performances that we almost take for granted – and they’ll wonder why we weren’t raving about her even more. They’ll wonder how it’s possible that anyone this brilliant ever existed.

If this sounds like praise gone to the edge of lunacy, take a look at the latest case in point, “The Iron Lady,” with Streep as the mighty prime minister that led Britain for 11 years. In most ways, this dramatization of Margaret Thatcher’s life is a disappointment. Instead of an epic film about the most consequential (like her or not) prime minister since Winston Churchill, we get the story of an old lady with dementia who remembers her life in scattered flashbacks. Instead of a movie that shows what made her extraordinary, we get one that shows how she, too, is subject to illness and the ravages of age.

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