Retro Reel by Sreepathy Volume 11

Retro Reel is a column about movies, but not about the latest box-office releases. There will be aspects of review, but the column is intended more as a recommendation of good movies of different genres, with the sense of a retrospective – hence, the ‘Retro’ in the name. In a day and age when movies are projected digitally, the word “reel” may seem retrograde and outdated. Yet, no other word captures the imagery of a movie as “Reel”…Sreepathy is an unabashed movie buff who loves a well-told onscreen story. He has a list of about 450 must-watch movies, and Retro Reel is an attempt to share with friends of a similar bent of mind, some of the best movie-watching experiences he has had. He lives in Naperville with his wife and two sons.

The Iron Lady

“We will stand on principle, or not stand at all.”

Lady Margaret Thatcher. You can quibble with her principles, question her philosophy, or quarrel with her ideology. What you cannot do, however, is to question her belief in her unshakeable convictions or her intense determination to act on those convictions. One of the most polarizing world figures of the 20th century (and according to one poll, Britain’s most hated leader of the century), she was a man among men when it came to ruling ruthlessly – and I use that phrase as a figure of speech, not to sound sexist by any stretch.

So, why should you watch The Iron Lady (2011) ? The movie is not a famous person’s biopic in the conventional sense of the word – it’s not a faithful true story that paints an inspiring picture of the rise of Mrs Thatcher from an ordinary grocer’s daughter to the most powerful woman in Great Britain’s parliamentary history. Neither is it a fawning portrayal of her fascinating personality by an adoring aficionado. The movie’s fictional narrative, set in the recent past when dementia overtook her in her aging years, is an interesting tangent that touches one aspect in the arc of her life: her husband, Denis Thatcher. The entire length of the movie tries to explore the soft underside of the Iron Lady’s otherwise hard persona. She is shown trying to shake off her husband’s continuing presence in her life, even though he has been dead and gone for a long time. She tinges all reminiscences of her earlier life with his character – a doting wife’s memories of a fond husband; her hallucinations using him as a prism to view her checkered past.

The narrative is not a well-structured story told in a linear fashion – rather it is a series of disjointed snippets and flashbacks, much like the web of mangled memories served up by her deranged condition of dementia. She frequently fancies living in her past, mixes up her present with her past and her past with her present. She relives her memories of growing up as a small business owner’s daughter, her father’s influence over her eventual extreme conservative outlook, her struggle in charting a political course for herself in being the first ever woman Member of Parliament of Britain’s hidebound patriarchal society of the 60s, her rise to the leadership position of the Tories, her becoming the Prime Minister of England, and ultimately her partymen’s conniving that led to her inevitable fall from power. The narrative also touches upon how she broke the back of Britain’s notorious trade union movement of the 70s and how she handled the historic Falklands crisis during which the quote about “principle” that we started with was credited to her. Each of those flashbacks has her husband, Denis, in the background – mostly shown in a positive light, supporting and egging her further on in the course of her steely, ambitious resolve. In between, she also remembers her children very fondly with a forlorn sense of not having done enough for them as a mother. Of course, all of this is told from a perspective that is neither factual nor rational, but rather one that is uniquely emotional and personal to her.

So, we go back to the question we started with: Why should you watch The Iron Lady ? Should you watch it for the compelling personality of Margaret Thatcher ? Maybe, but not really. The movie’s most interesting aspect of narrating from a unique vantage point itself proves to be its undoing. Its script stutters on two counts. Firstly, it introduces a fictional perspective that doesn’t jell with the historically well-known personality of Mrs Thatcher, especially as it chronicles factual events alongside. It shows her as a helpless old woman grasping at shadows, questioning her own actions from the past, looking for sympathy and understanding, and feeling let down by the people around her. Worse, it panders to the conformist cliché that at the end of the day a woman should somehow yearn for her husband’s approval and support in all things big and small.

Secondly, the script makes the unpardonable mistake of showing a dementia patient, especially one who is famous and still living, at her weakest and most hopeless. You may argue that we can learn and understand much about such a patient’s life from a narrative like this, but not if it is unauthorized or is vehemently contested by her immediate family, which apparently is true in this case. Both Mrs Thatcher’s son and daughter have lashed out against the movie for the way it incorrectly portrays the struggle and helplessness of Lady Thatcher grappling with her maladjusted mental condition. Phyllida Lloyd has directed the movie with a certain amount of élan, but even her deft directorial touches cannot rescue the movie from the distress of its script.

If not for Mrs Thatcher’s compelling personality, you should watch the Iron Lady for the consummate performance of Meryl Streep playing her. Richly deserving of the Oscar she received for this role (Meryl Streep holds a record seventeen Oscar nominations in her name), this is by far the best of her superlative acting career. Her awesome range of acting prowess redeems the movie from its script’s snafu, and she gives the idiom “getting under the skin of a character” a whole new meaning. Aided by some exquisite make-up work, she blurs the line between actor and character – you really begin to wonder where the actor ends and the character begins. Meryl Streep wears the persona of Mrs Thatcher like a superbly fitted dress, but not like a readymade that perchance suited her perfectly in the fitting room of a department store. Rather, you can feel the weight of the effort she has put in to carefully measure, cut, and tailor it to complement the contours of the character. Her interpretation of the miasma of a dementia patient’s misty world is not only very touching, but extremely accurate too. Look out for a scene at a dining table where all she does is just shake her hands to effectively convey a mix of plaintiveness, indifference, resignation, and a sense of withering arrogance, all at once. So complete is her act that it pales everything else and every other performance in the movie into oblivion. And by the time the end-credits begin to roll, you’ll start walking away with more Meryl on your mind than Margaret…

PS: ‘The Iron Lady’ is available in the Naperville Public Library.