BARENAKED LADY

An elderly hand takes a container of milk from a convenience-store refrigerator. That’s how The Iron Lady begins. The hand belongs to the long-retired Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep), who buys the milk and scurries home, unrecognized & unnoticed, one more old ratbag in an ugly winter coat.

In terms of narrative, it may be the cleverest touch in the movie—not just beginning an epic about a long & nasty era in British history with a poignant, small-scale episode, but also beginning the film in a grocery store. The Iron Lady makes the point, early & often, that Lady Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter to the depths of her soul.

Hardly anything else that ensues is of much interest cinematically, but then, it doesn’t seem meant to be. The film is built as a showcase for Streep’s performance, & the result is effectively a one-woman show.

As usual, she makes it an entertaining one. After her hilarious & endearing turn as an expansive, ecstatic, flirtatious Julia Child in Julie & Julia, she’s inevitably not as much fun as this small-souled woman, with her cross perplexity at everyone else’s failure to perceive how right she is. In the end, though, Streep uses these very limitations to generate pathos, & she gives Thatcher witty little flashes of weariness with her own company.

The movie’s achievement, as opposed to Streep’s, is harder to pinpoint. Much as I resent the director, Phyllida Lloyd, for the minutes of my life I gave to her previous film Mamma Mia!, I’ll grant that her work here is mostly efficient. The script, by Abi Morgan, presents a fairly perfunctory chronicle history of the PM’s life—her youth (in which she’s played, capably, by Welsh actress Alexandra Roach) as the worshipful daughter of a Grantham grocer father & an emotionally aloof mother, her early political ambitions & her marriage to Denis Thatcher, her rise within the Tories, her ascension to Prime Minister. Then come the mining strikes, the IRA, the Falkland War, the assassination attempt.

This stuff is all strung, in flashback, along much fuller scenes of Thatcher as an old lady, infirm, condescended-to by her children & heckled by the ghost of the departed Denis (Jim Broadbent). This seems to be the principal concern of the movie: depicting the Iron Lady as aged, sick, bereaved, helpless. A hardhearted viewer might note that these were all categories of humanity for which the Lady showed minimal concern during her career, but Streep, subtle & slyly funny as ever, has it in her power to soften some pretty hard hearts.

She’s got her work cut out for her. Even some of us who have never set foot in the UK may feel our jaws clench at the very mention of the name “Margaret Thatcher.” Along with Ronald Reagan & John Paul II, she’s part of the current neocon Holy Trinity (that none of them could now pass a Tea Party litmus test is both ironic & a testament to their own self-devouring reactionary influence). Thatcher’s importance in 20th-Century history is undeniable, & so is the sad leveling power of age & illness & personal loss. But only by combining these two truths can a Thatcher biopic become palatable for many of us.