"Preposterous! Appalling! Absolutely a non-starter!"
I'm channelling Margaret Thatcher here, aka the Iron Lady, Britain's first female prime minister, imagining her horrified reaction to a controversial new biopic, The Iron Lady, and to the glorious but questionable performance by Meryl Streep who so ferociously becomes her that she will no doubt waltz away with an Oscar next month.
Depending where you are on the political spectrum, Margaret, Baroness Thatcher, now 86, sadly suffering from dementia and hidden from public view, was either the greatest British leader since Winston Churchill, dragging Britain into the modern age, or a holy Conservative terror who destroyed whole industries, slashed the benefits of her neediest citizens and imperiously finger-wagged her way through 11 tumultuous years (1979-1990) in power. Wearing her double set of pearls, she even marched into war with Argentina over the obscure Falkland Islands, and, by God, give or take several hundred dead bodies, she won.
I've seen the movie twice and each time I come away thinking what a surprising, brave and ultimately interesting choice director Phyllida Lloyd (of Mamma Mia! fame) has made, opting to focus so much on Mrs. Thatcher's current reduced mental state. She depicts her stumbling around her London home, hallucinating her dead husband Denis, desperately trying to remember and put in sequence her glory days as the political leader, who along with former U.S. president Ronald Reagan (who also spent years diminished by Alzheimer's before his death) redefined conservatism for the modern era.
Call it Irony Lady. How could such a formidable and ground-breaking leader end up on the screen like any other addled elderly woman who never changed history at all, her once famously styled hair dishevelled, quizzically trying to grasp both the past and the present (for Alzheimer's sufferers there is no future), standing over the kitchen sink, soaping her lone tea cup even though that was precisely what she passionately told her then fiancé Denis she would never do – die doing the washing up.
British Prime Minister David Cameron this week rebuked the movie for turning his country's lone legendary female leader (apart from the Queen, who apparently never liked Thatcher) into an object of pity, saying it should have been "delayed" until her death. The critics, while lauding Ms. Streep's brilliant turn, have been at best lukewarm about a movie they grumble doesn't do Thatcher's controversial political career justice. And some commentators have said this would never happen to a male politician of Thatcher's stature – instead of a gritty play-by-play of her political life, she gets a movie highlighting an oddly sexy woman, the daughter of a grocer, who turned her back on her children's needs and paid a uniquely high price for power.
Nonsense. Every politician, male or female, sacrifices family life in the quest for power. Thatcher was no exception, but like few women in politics, she had a publicly devoted spouse in Denis, a successful businessman who stood steadily and humbly at her side for all of her career. He was roundly made fun of in his time for being either hen-pecked or too first lady-ish. The movie, with Jim Broadbent as the ghost of Denis, is also a portrait of their enduring marriage.
Margaret Thatcher had no use for women's liberation, or for most women for that matter. "I've always preferred the company of men," she says in the movie to her clearly damaged adult daughter. Yet she encountered every bit of the same sexism that transformed many women of her time into ardent feminists – she was criticized for "shrieking" when she was merely speaking forcefully, for acting like a "housewife" instead of a leader, for being hectoring and nannyish, and of course for verbally castrating her male colleagues. "Weak, weak ,weak," Ms. Streep as Thatcher hisses, about the frustrated and humiliated cabal of Conservative men who eventually deposed her.
In England, the movie is packing them in. You could put a prurient spin on that, saying that many Brits might even delight in seeing her so humbled, not able to fully enjoy her elder stateswoman status. (Think of how much of a force she still could have been, pronouncing on foreign affairs, showing up to speak at conferences.)
Never mind. It won't get its critical due, but The Iron Lady is a wonderful essay on how many of the mighty are felled: Not by invading armies, not by Machiavellian practitioners of the dark art of politics, not by scandal or moral weakness, not even by their own hubris or Icarus-like compulsion to fly too close to the sun.
No, they are felled as you or I could be – by the ravages of age and the tragedy of a keen mind sputtering, dimming, then dying as the body limps on. Even her opponents couldn't wish this on the Iron Lady.
But the contemplation of such mortality, up there on the silver screen, makes for a powerful and poignant – and ultimately more universal – experience. Ironically, she will gain new fans because of it.