Listen. Margaret Thatcher has come unstuck in time.
There are several formulaic ways to do a biopic of a major figure. As this “story” of the former Conservative British Prime Minister begins, we find the elderly, present-day Thatcher buying some milk at a local store and walking it home. Then there’s a moment where she looks off, distantly, and cue flashback. And so I figure they’re doing what I’ll call the Dewey Cox method (from Walk Hard): “Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life before he plays!”
But I was wrong. In one of the many, many things horribly wrong with this film, so wrong as to be near-offensive, they’re not just flashing back. The entire film’s structure is based around this 24 hour period of the present-day Thatcher continuing to think back with her husband Dennis. But what makes it so much worse is this (barely spoiler-y): early on, you learn that her elderly husband (Jim Broadbent) has been dead for years, and he’s just a hallucination she converses with. And director Phyllida Lloyd embraces this Beautiful Mind-like mental uncertainty with weird angles and wipes, Broadbent appearing and disappearing at inopportune times, etc. It’s like an acid trip, in that it’s not only jumping back and forth in time, but how the camera-work embraces Thatcher’s dementia. Say what you will about Thatcher’s politics, but whose ridiculous idea was it to build a bio-pic about the first female Prime Minister around her senility?!
And this leads me to the other horrendous flaw in the film: the script’s telling (or not so much) of Thatcher’s, you know, actual life. Once the flashback-and-forth format begins focusing more on her life story and less on seeing dead people, we meet young Thatcher, running for a place in Parliament. Then she’s Education Secretary. The she decides to run for Prime Minister. Then she gets it. And throughout this entire part of her life, we’re given no significant insight as to her beliefs, beyond a few lines of speeches. We don’t feel any rise through the political machine. We don’t know anything about her, or who she is. The majority of the script up to that point just hammers home that she’s a woman in a man’s world. “Look how much sexism she had to face!”, and yet forgetting to tell us exactly what she faced it with.
Her time as Prime Minister is equally absent any detail. We often see news footage of riots, or bombings. We have an idea that she fought against unions, with no real understanding of what the unions were or weren’t doing. We have an idea that there are bombings going on (even one that threatened her and her husband), and yet no real exploration of what the IRA was about, or how she dealt with them. Then we see news footage of the Falkland Islands war, and we see her adamant to keep them British, but no detail beyond “there’s war and Thatcher wants to win”. Her entire life is presented as a “what”, without a shred of “why” or “how”.
Maybe the filmmakers were afraid of making the film too political? Indeed some of Thatcher’s short blurbs of dogma in the film include anti-union ideas, cutting the debt through sacrifice, and making the poor pay as much tax as the rich. That’s still pretty familiar talk today, and likely would have stoked a lot of passions. In my opinion, all the more reason to dive into her life via film with as much detail as possible: show that her ideas still resound today, still provoke impassioned debate. Alas, for reasons I can’t even fathom, the filmmakers chose to gloss over the majority of her life for the “drama” of dementia in the lady’s later life. For all these reasons, this is one of the worst films of 2011.
NOTE: Yes, the film itself is so bad that I didn’t even remember to mention Streep’s performance. Of course she’s great. But deck chairs… Titanic, and so on.
