SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Here's my review of The Devil Wears Prada 2...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

FOR AULD LANG SYNE, MY JO

Here's Your Humble Narrator's last movie review for the 'Teens, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Greta Gerwig's Little Women...

RIP to Rutle and auxiliary Python Neil Innes, passed on at 75. My pal Dave and I had the good luck to see him perform, solo and acoustic, at some little club here in Phoenix almost twenty years ago; he was superb.

Have a wonderful 2020 everybody!

GOOD GRADE

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and The Equalizer 2, as well as a revival showing Sunday, at FilmBar, of George Romero's Season of the Witch.

Also opening this weekend...

Eighth Grade--The heroine of writer-director Bo Burnham's comedy-drama is Kayla (Elsie Fisher), a 13-year-old, trying to navigate the last few days of the title grade. She takes a very proactive approach, posting online videos offering social advice despite her own awkwardness, the obvious intended beneficiary of her optimistic wisdom being herself.

She gets invited to a popular girl's birthday party, mainly because the girl's mom is interested in Kayla's single dad (Josh Hamilton). She struggles with a crush on a boy in her class, and assures him of her excellence at giving blowjobs. She participates in a deeply creepy live-shooter drill at school. She shadows a cool friendly older girl at the high school she'll be attending next year. And in a scene that will be excruciatingly familiar to many parents, she endures the clumsy attempts of her adoring dad to get her to put down her phone at the dinner table and engage with him.

These episodes seem to drift into Kayla's life at random, and most of them just drift back out, with no particular dramatic payoff for good or ill. Burnham uses loose ends to emphasize the odd limbo of the middle school years; things pop up that look like they're going to be earth-shakingly important, only to disappear just as quickly, and now and then something that seems inconsequential proves significant after all.

Burnham and the superb, subtle young Fisher refuse to sentimentalize Kayla, but they also insist that we experience the story from her viewpoint. Even when she's the butt of the joke, we may laugh, but we feel her pain, and ultimately she's among the most lovable of teen-movie protagonists. Eighth Grade is low-key, but it packs a cumulative emotional punch. Burnham's disciplined naturalistic touch and sympathetic wit make it funny, poignant, even universal.

MORE THAN THE SUMMER OF ITS PARTS

Opening this weekend:

Measure of a Man--In 1976, chubby fourteen-year-old New Yorker Bobby Marks (Blake Cooper) spends the summer with his family at a cabin in a rural upstate town. Mostly to avoid getting stuck at camp again, Bobby gets a job at a beautiful nearby manse, mowing lawns and cleaning gutters and doing other such disagreeable chores for an imperious and exacting Jewish doctor (Donald Sutherland).

Based on Robert Lipsyte's novel One Fat Summer (written in the mid-'70s but set in the '50s), this movie is about as prototypical as coming-of-age stories get: A sensitive teenage kid is challenged to be a better version of himself by a gruff but wise mentor, and applies what he learns to other conflicts in his life. It feels almost like the result of an assignment:  Encounters with local bullies, who of course loathe "summer people"--check. Platonic friendship with charming girl next door (Danielle Rose Russell)--check. Wild behavior by Bobby's older sister (Liana Liberato) and turbulence in the marriage of his parents (Judy Greer and Luke Wilson)--check and check.

In short, there's nothing especially new or surprising here. That said, the familiar episodes we're given are nicely executed by director Jim Loach, working from a script by David Scearce. The period of the Bicentennial summer is convincingly evoked without heavy-handedness, and the performances are capable. Young Cooper, from The Maze Runner, carries the movie easily. The supporting players don't get a lot to do, but Greer is sweet as the Mom, who's trying to keep up a cheerful front, and in his brief but strategically-placed scenes, Sutherland makes the doctor's forbiddingly formal old-country manners amusing. Beau Knapp is scary, but not without pathos, as Willie, the leader of the bullies.

The scenes in which Bobby is tormented by Willie and his pals are frightening and infuriating, but not, alas, implausible. Like Bobby, I was fourteen in 1976. I was one state over in rural Pennsylvania, and while I was socio-economically a lot closer to this movie's locals than to its "summer people," I can attest that whatever its shortcomings, Measure of a Man gets its bullies right.

Check out my short column, on Phoenix Magazine online, about a special free sing-along screening of the original Mamma Mia! at Harkins Camelback at 10 a.m. this Sunday morning, for Mother's Day. Also, check out my Phoenix Magazine "Four Corners" column about new restaurants that have, like culinary hermit crabs, taken over the spaces left behind by notable earlier eateries.

THE POST POST

Opening here this weekend:

The Post--Steven Spielberg's latest is, in a sense, a prequel to All the President's Men. Scripted by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, it dramatizes the Washington Post's handling of the Pentagon Papers story in 1971, in the face of the threat of legal action by the White House. Not that it's topically relevant or anything.

The revelations in the DOD documents sneaked out by Daniel Ellsberg had already broken in the New York Times but were stopped by a federal injunction after only the first few articles had run there. Ellsberg then gave the documents to the Post, among other media outlets, and editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katherine Graham were put in the position of deciding whether to defy the injunction.

The result, at least according to this movie, had a lot to do with putting the Post on the map as a national rather than a local paper. In other words, the story did more for the Post than the Post did for the story, and the movie could be criticized for being off-center: A journalist I know said he liked the film but thought it could more justly have been called The Times.

Maybe so, but the specific content of the Pentagon Papers case isn't really the dramatic meat and potatoes here. It's true that, as he did in Lincoln, Spielberg opens The Post with a brief but scary battle scene, to remind us that this isn't a civics class; these decisions have real-world consequences. Still, at some level this could be about any hot-potato exposé. Spielberg and the screenwriters boil the drama down to the choice of whether to run the story, not over doubt in its accuracy but under pressure from government bullying.

This is, admittedly, more superficial than All the President's Men, with its detailed unraveling of the implications of the Watergate case, and of the tiny clues and pitfalls that can make or break an investigative piece. But on its simpler level, The Post is exhilarating journo-porn, shot in newsprint tones by Janusz Kaminski and peopled with a fine pack of veteran character players, from David Cross to Tracy Letts to Carrie Coon to Michael Stuhlbarg to Bradley Whitford to Michael Rhys as the haunted Ellsberg to Bruce Greenwood as the even more haunted Robert McNamara. I think my favorite of the supporting ensemble, however, was Bob Odenkirk as a perpetually downcast Ben Bagdikian.

As Bradlee, Tom Hanks is unlikely to displace the classic turn by Jason Robards in ATPM, but he's steady and amusing as ever. All are overshadowed, however, by the star turn of Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham. Her attempt to rise to the ethical dilemma and potential legal jeopardy in which she has improbably found herself is touching, and its resolution is thrilling.

GO WITH THE FLO

Opening this weekend: Two stories from the 1940s, very different, both worth seeing:

 

Florence Foster Jenkins—The title character was a much-loved patron of the New York classical music scene who loved to sing. She was a nice lady, and a rich lady, and thus nobody had the heart, or the nerve, to tell her that she sounded like an angry monkey defending its tree branch.

Besides, the carefully cherry-picked audiences for her recitals found her performances funny. In the early ‘40s she cut some records which actually received some radio airplay, and in 1944 finally gave a performance at Carnegie Hall—which, alas, legitimate music critics were able to attend.

This interesting little story from Manhattan’s high-culture scene certainly seems irresistible as movie material (there have already been several stage versions of it). But it also had the potential to make a really ugly movie. Many of us who love music and have no talent still indulge the fantasy of performing, and it could have been agonizingly embarrassing to see the consequences of someone living that fantasy out, especially in front of a smirking audience of musical heavy-hitters.

Happily, Florence Foster Jenkins was helmed by the masterly, old-school Stephen Frears, working from a script by Nicholas Martin. Three years ago Frears brought a gentle, lightly comic energy to Philomena, which could have been a drag for very different, more serious reasons, but instead was a delight. With Florence Foster Jenkins his touch is more broad, even farcical, but the movie has the same generous-hearted tone and emotional maturity, not to mention a lush period atmosphere.

Of course, Frears would have been helpless without Meryl Streep, bringing Florence something of the same dotty lovability that she gave to Julia Child in Julie & Julia. Simon Helberg, as Florence’s accompanist Cosme McMoon, turns his lines into a master class in effete dithering. And as St. Clair Bayfield, the failed Shakespearean and Broadway veteran who became Florence’s manager and common-law husband, Hugh Grant has rarely been better—suavely sheepish and witty in his tireless efforts to keep her reality pleasant, and deluded in his belief that he’s always successful. 

Anthropoid—This historical thriller, which dramatizes the plot to assassinate Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, keeps us tense with murmured conversations in back rooms and furtive romance between bursts of violence. We badly want Czech partisans Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan to succeed in killing “The Butcher of Prague”—an SS bigwig and Chairman of the Wannsee Conference—even though we know that if they do, the reprisals will be horrible, and director Sean Ellis, who co-scripted with Anthony Frewin, uses this ambiguity to give Anthropoid a brooding mix of tragedy and exhilaration.

Squeamish viewers should be forewarned: Anthropoid is gripping, but also Jacobean. There are scenes of torture that are hard to watch, and the movie’s sacrificial lambs can be spotted a mile away.

O RICKI, WHAT A PITY

Opening this weekend: 

 
Ricki and the Flash—Meryl Streep has been a favorite of mine since, if memory serves, the second movie I ever reviewed, The Seduction of Joe Tynan back in 1979. If I recall, I referred to her as a “brilliant newcomer”; a nervy line from a seventeen-year-old, but I wasn’t wrong. Much as I loved her work back in those accent du jour days, however, I love her even more now—she's lightened up, and loosened up, and her performances are genuinely fun.

I also love Jonathan Demme, and I’ve missed him. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s he turned out a bunch of sophisticated yet unpretentious, entirely accessible classics and near-classics, like Something Wild, Married to the Mob, Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but he hasn’t made anything anywhere near that level in years.

And I have a high regard for Diablo Cody, who crafted the snappy but heartfelt dialogue for Juno back in 2007. For that matter, I love Kevin Kline.

Which is why it pains me to report that the collaboration of all of the above, Ricki and the Flash, despite plenty of good work, is a miss, and not even a near-miss.

Streep plays Ricki, who abandoned her upper-middle-class Indiana family decades earlier to follow her rock star dreams in California. She had one failed album, and now she and The Flash serve as the house cover band at a bar in Tarzana, where they often outnumber their fans. Her lead guitarist (Rick Springfield, who looks agreeably a bit Kris Kristofferson-ish with middle age) is also her main squeeze, though she holds him at arm’s length emotionally.

Her patient, recessive ex (Kline), who long since remarried a supermom (Audra McDonald), has made peace with Ricki, but her three grown kids still resent her, at different levels of bitterness. Ricki gets a call from the ex that their daughter (Mamie Gummer) has been dumped by her husband and is in bad shape. When Ricki gets to Indianapolis, she finds that this was an understatement.

Nothing terribly wrong with any of this, on paper, and there are many sharp, funny passages of dialogue and lively little episodes. Cody has a way of departing from the standard movie-character playbook—Ricki, for instance, is one of those Tea Partiers who turn up at times in fields where you wouldn’t expect them. She makes sour cracks about Obama from the stage, voted twice for George W. Bush, and even has a Gadsden Flag tattooed on her back.

As always with Demme, the settings ring with authenticity and there are terrific touches of atmosphere. But there’s a slackness to the pacing and a sloppiness to the transitions that keep the movie from adding up, somehow, either as drama or as comedy.

Or, I’m afraid, as a jukebox musical, either. Streep is a fine musical talent—she handled the folk numbers in Altman’s Prairie Home Companion and the show tunes in Into the Woods with authority and wit. But the classic rock in Ricki and the Flash just isn’t a good fit for her voice and performing style, and Demme saddles her with several full numbers. I don’t wish to be ungallant, but let’s just say that it’s not terribly surprising that Ricki’s album wasn’t a success.

About the best thing I can say for Ricki and the Flash is that it doesn’t punish us too much. The movie climaxes at a wedding. I knew there were going to be toasts and speeches and awkward encounters, and I tensed up, remembering Demme’s 2008 Rachel Getting Married. But Demme and Cody give us a break—they don’t seem determined to make us miserable. Ricki’s gesture at the wedding is borderline inappropriate yet nonetheless lovely, and it ends the film on a pleasant note. But it’s faint praise when the best feeling a movie gives you is relief at what it didn’t do.

MERRY CHRISTMAS...

...from Less Hat, Moorhead!

Into the Woods—A friend of mine likes to say that “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” and “Pittsburgh” are two of the more aptly named entities in creation. I can’t agree with him about the second; I’ve always been fond of Pittsburgh. But there’s no arguing the grimness of those tales.

So Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1986 fairy-tale musical Into the Woods can’t really be called “dark” by comparison to its source material. This retelling of several Grimm yarns is dark only by comparison to the toned-down and glitzed-up style of fairy tales popularized by Disney and its ilk over the past century. Perhaps ironically, it’s Disney that has produced the lavish, star-studded and entertaining movie version of Into the Woods opening today.

Set, like a Ren Faire, in a period-vague Once Upon a Time with elements of the Renaissance, the 19th Century and the 20th Century—the Big Bad Wolf dresses like a swing dancer—Into the Woods weaves the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk around the plight of a Baker and his Wife who are unable to conceive. These two learn from a neighborhood Witch that this is because of a curse upon their house. She gives them the recipe to lift the curse, which brings them into contact with the other characters.

Rob Marshall, who more or less revived the big-screen musical as a viable genre with his 2002 Chicago, directs nimbly, but with an agreeably more straightforward, less hyper-cut style. His work is accomplished, but as usual with musicals, the real key to its success lies in the cast, and the score.

The standouts in the cast, for me, were Meryl Streep, a hoot as the Witch, Emily Blunt as the Baker’s potentially naughty Wife, James Corden as the kindly young Baker, and a startling, apparently genetically-engineered little belter called Lilla Crawford as Red Riding Hood. Johnny Depp is droll in the brief role of the Wolf, Tracey Ullman is funny as Jack’s fed-up Mum, Anna Kendrick makes a sweet Cinderella, and as her self-impressed Prince Charming, Chris Pine, along with Billy Magnussen as Rapunzel’s Prince, scored spontaneous applause from the preview audience with whom I saw the film for their self-parodying duet “Agony.”

As for the score, it’s very, well, Sondheim-y, which for many is about the highest compliment a score can be paid. It’s pretty, if not, overall, as melodically soaring as some of Sondheim’s; it has a more frenetic, haywire sound, in support of the complex, almost patter-song lyrics. It’s compelling, though—when each number is done, you know you’ve really heard something, and you want to hear it again.

About halfway through the movie—at the end of Act One in the stage version—the plot strands are all ingeniously brought to a traditionally happily-ever-after resolution. But Sondheim and Lapine want to remind us that happily-ever-after is fantasy, and that a wish fulfilled always comes at a price—worth it, maybe, but never painless.

The long second act in which the characters wander the forest, struggling with the consequences of their wishes, is the unconcealed point of Into the Woods. But while there is much good music and comedy in this section, you can feel the impatience of the audience—plenty of them were quite satisfied with the corny fake ending, and palpably regard this elaboration as a tiresome imposition (I understand the school-play version of the show simply drops Act Two). It isn’t enough to ruin Into the Woods, but many viewers would have been perfectly happy with happily-ever-after.

So anyway...

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s make this triceratops skeleton come to life in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb our Christmas Day MOTW…

HOME ON DERANGED

Here’s an interesting one I finally caught up with this week, still in theaters here in the Valley:

The Homesman—It’s not the sort of movie you’d recommend for lighthearted holiday viewing—essentially, it’s one serious downer after another. Spoiler alert: this movie offers a woman losing three babies to diphtheria, a man sexually violating his wife while her mother looks on, and—get ready—a woman tossing her newborn into the pit of an outhouse.

The task of transporting these three near-catatonic women from their wretched Nebraska Territory town back east to a church haven in relatively civilized Iowa falls to Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), a capable unmarried farmer. She rescues a scruffy claim jumper (Tommy Lee Jones) from lynching in return for a vow that he’ll accompany her on the trek. He does, and further dangers, miseries and humiliations ensue.

If you can steel yourself to these horrors and heartaches, this bitter western, directed by Jones and boasting a cast that includes the likes of James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, John Lithgow, Barry Corbin and Meryl Streep, is worthwhile. It’s tragic, certainly, but it’s vigorous and expansive; it feels alive.

Jones seems to be a real moviemaker. In this film as in his previous feature, 2005’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, he shows both an eye and an unembarrassed readiness to engage the issues at the core of the conflicted American soul.

He also gives his usual effortlessly commanding performance. For most of the film, however, the real star is Swank. She’s heartbreaking as this strong but emotionally impoverished woman, starved for music, quietly desperate to find a man who doesn’t think she’s too "bossy" to marry, pathetically trying to make a whimsical game of naming her mules. She’s supposed to be “plain,” but even bereft of makeup she is, of course, a fine-boned beauty. If you can look past this Hollywood convention, though, it’s a superb and devastating performance.

The Homesman is based, by the way, on a 1988 novel by Glendon Swarthout. Odd to think he’s the same guy who wrote Where the Boys Are.

GIVEN LAME

New this week:

The Giver—In the future, people live in a homogenized, insipid “Community” in which life is carefully programmed and deep emotions, positive or negative, are suppressed through daily doses of medication. An adolescent boy, Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), is assigned to be the new “Receiver of Memories,” the repository for the recollections of the human race from which everybody else is protected, and which are transmitted to him in psychic blasts from the current repository, an old man called “The Giver.”

The great Jeff Bridges plays this title role in this adaptation, directed by Phillip Noyce, of a much-honored young adult novel by Lois Lowry of 1993, and there’s nothing especially wrong with his sly, growling performance. There’s plenty wrong with the movie, however. I can’t speak to the quality of the novel, but what made it to the screen is a rehash of Huxley’s Brave New World, with dashes of Logan’s Run, The Island and a couple of episodes of Twilight Zone.

It’s less enjoyable than any of these, however (even The Island!), and toward the end, as Jonas flees the community in an attempt to rescue what appears to be the world’s most durable baby, the story simply collapses into a pile of implausibility and absurdity and vagueness. Jonas calls this baby “Gabriel,” but his Mom (Katie Holmes) refers to him as “Uncertain,” which I thought was a particularly kick-ass name.

THEY'RE ALTOGETHER OKIE, THE AIKEN FAMILY

August: Osage County—Beverly Aiken, a poet, drinks too much, while his wife Violet, who’s struggling with mouth cancer, is addicted to pain pills. When the former, played by Sam Shepard, disappears one day, the latter, played by Meryl Streep, summons their daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis) as well as her sister (the superb Margo Martindale) to the family manse in rural Oklahoma.

In the wake of these harpies come various spouses, cousins, kids and significant others, played by the likes of Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Abigail Breslin, Dermot Mulroney and the lately-ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch. The Aikens spend the rest of the movie, adapted by Tracey Letts from his Pulitzer Prize-winning Sam Shepard-esque play and directed by TV journeyman John Wells, cutting into each other with blame, ridicule and vitriolic language. Wounding family secrets are revealed, plates get broken. A Cheyenne caregiver (Misty Upham) skulks around stoically, making herself useful; she’s like an ambassador from the world of sanity.

Given its cast and pedigree, it would be tough for August: Osage County to pack no punch at all. There are effective passages of dialogue, and most of the actors get at least a scene or two to shine. Streep goes back to the “accent acting” that so often got her branded a showoff earlier in her career, but here it’s to comic effect—her low, drawn-out syllables are frighteningly funny, especially when she lifts them into a sudden tone of authority.

The whole ensemble squeezes as much grim humor as they can out of this material—it helps that the characters crack themselves and each other up a lot. They seem amused by their own awfulness. As with the 2011 film of another play by Letts, his trailer-park Grand Guignol Killer Joe, the inherent theatricality of the work is unmistakable; you may reflect that it would play stronger live. Even so, the movie is polished and almost never dull.

You may also ask yourself at times, however, how it is that you’re supposed to find the vituperation of this creepy clan enriching. Maybe we’re meant to be grateful for our families by comparison.

Lone Survivor—Mark Wahlberg plays Marcus Luttrell, one of a team of U.S. Navy Seals involved in Operation Red Wings, an ill-fated 2005 mission to locate a Taliban bigwig in a village in northeastern Afghanistan. Luttrell and three other Seals were discovered by locals and attacked by Taliban forces. A badly wounded Luttrell was eventually given shelter by an Afghan family, at great risk to themselves, and got back to safety alive.

Apparently there is some uncertainty about the accuracy of the book, by Luttrell and Patrick Robinson, from which his movie is adapted; the number of Taliban fighters these men faced is disputed. We in the audience are obviously in no position to offer judgment on this, but I can certainly say that the film, scripted and directed by the capable actor turned capable writer-director Peter Berg, is a grim, scary military actioner.

Wahlberg, who was also among the film’s producers, offers one of his more sympathetic acting turns in years. Be forewarned, though, that Berg’s battle scenes in Lone Survivor, though they leave us admiring the Seals for their bravery and endurance, and the villagers for their hospitality, are bloody, horrifying and shot through with a sense of nightmarish futility.

OSCARS, THE GROUCHES

A couple of Oscar notes: The verdict online appears to be that last night’s show sucked, sucked, sucked, or at best that it was boring. This is the usual verdict any more, & I don’t think it has much to do with the quality of the show (except for last year’s, which got particularly venomous notices).

Over the last twenty years, the hosting duties have been given to a variety of comedic geniuses—Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen DeGeneres, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin—most of whom have been declared failures. I liked them all (I thought Martin was especially funny). All of them have been found wanting by comparison to Billy Crystal, who hosted the show for the 9th time last night. But when he’s hosted, he too has usually been found wanting by plenty of viewers.

I think that the petulant response that so many contemporary fans have to most Oscar telecasts in recent years has more to do with the show failing to give them the sense of giddy excitement that it did when they were kids. Last night’s show did kind of suck, & it was kind of boring, but my suspicion is that Oscar shows always have been—they’ve always represented the lamest of a species of self-consciously old-fashioned variety show, & that’s what we want. We want to hate the Oscars, & we’d hate them even more if they were somehow made “modern.” We’d probably hate them most of all in the unlikely event that they ever were a couple of tightly-paced hours of really first-rate entertainment.

I thought that Crystal, maybe the last of the comedians who sees doing a song-&-dance number as a routine part of his job rather than something for which he should get extra credit, managed his duties last night excellently, more relaxed & confident than he’s been in some past years. The Cirque de Soleil number was impressive, & I also loved this short sketch with Bob Balaban, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Christopher Guest & Jennifer Coolidge about a focus group for The Wizard of Oz, although I understand that it was poorly received...

When Crystal said “Weren’t they hilarious?” afterwards, many (likely similar) people online were quick to reply “No.”

The only remotely surprising win of the night, I thought, was Meryl Streep’s for The Iron Lady. It was a pleasant surprise—the movie was thin & weak apart from her, but that performance was sensational.

My gripe this year, as so often, was with the necrology. It was cool that George Kuchar was included, but here’s a list, compiled with the help of some friends, of those omitted: Harry Morgan, Charles Napier, Jeff Conaway, Sid Melton, Yvette Vickers, Tura Satana, Zina Bethune & Zalman King, among others.

You could quibble about some of these, maybe, but…no Harry Morgan? Really?

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.