Plucky woman

The Iron Lady is a better performance than it is film, although I suspect the performance will carry the day. My good friend Meryl Streep, whom I have personally witnessed making pie with her very own Meryl hands, is awesome, flawless and magnificent, etc. but the film itself is peculiarly glib and superficial and somehow brushes over her actual politics. It is Thatcher without Thatcherism. It is Thatcher as a kind of Boadicea or Queen Elizabeth I. It is Gloriana of the kind that will please the Right and pleases Bruce Anderson (see feature pages) although, let’s be honest, anything that pleases Bruce Anderson does have to be a bit wrong somewhere. I hope Bruce will forgive me saying this, or what? Not sit on me, I hope. No one could be expected to survive that. (No, Bruce, no!)

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd from a script by Abi Morgan, it opens with a little old tottering head-scarfed lady entering a corner shop. She looks up when she reaches the counter, and we see it is Thatcher, or Meryl as Thatcher, although it amounts to the same thing, more or less, and you will gasp. Streep captures Thatcher’s mannerisms and voice and look without, somehow, ever descending into caricature. It never even feels like an impersonation. It’s miraculous. You have to see it to believe it. Anyway, Thatcher is confused. She is confused by the hoodie in the headphones behind her. She is confused when it comes to paying. She has dementia and has, it turns out, momentarily escaped Chester Square and her round-the-clock minders to buy a pint of milk. It is a poignant opening and one which asks for sympathy for her, if you’ve a mind to give it.

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Thatcher is returned to Chester Square, where she talks to Denis (Jim Broadbent), imagining he is still alive — her dementia is handled with great sensitivity, I think — drinks rather a lot of whisky and gives Carol (touchingly played by Olivia Colman) short shrift.