THE IRON LADY

Hear the click?

title: THE IRON LADY
year: 2012
cast: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent
rating: *1/2

During a montage where Margaret Thatcher's rising in the polls and is, for her party at least, on top of her political game, an aggressive punk rock tune blasts over the scene – and it’s against Margaret Thatcher. There you have the underlying tone of this biopic weaving back and forth from an aged Thatcher, hallucinating her dead husband and trying to recall pieces from a jigsaw puzzle life, to the young climber growing up poor, asserting herself as a lone woman amongst the barking men of Parliament, and eventually becoming Prime Minister of England. But we never get to know who she was, what she did, or why she did it; unless you count sporadic jump cuts of mobs protesting against her, which, like that punk song, provides a subliminal cue card to remind the audience how and what to feel, but never why. Now the question: How was Meryl Streep’s performance? Well the iconic actress, donning surprisingly realistic Aged makeup, does a fine job as the older Thatcher struggling to hold her mind together – but it’s impossible to judge her as the historical figure since another actress played the assertive young woman who fought for that place where, by the time Streep takes over, is lost in a jumbled collection of newsreels and pointless monologs... always returning to the old lady suffering the beginning stages of dementia, who, like the film itself, is never quite sure what's going on.