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Sunday, 3 February 2013

The Iron Lady Review

Our verdict on the Oscar-nominated 2011 British politics drama.
"I may be prepared to surrender the hat- but the pearls are absolutely non-negotiable." Sweet, minor moments of comic relief such as this one from Meryl Streep's take on Margaret Thatcher are few and far between in The Iron Lady, an ambitious motion picture that looks to explore the British Prime Minister's current plight of dementia, yet it's these same moments that define the success with which the film achieves its goals. Streep is the perfect woman to portray Thatcher in the end, both in her haunting flashbacks and in her modern day guise, and ultimately it's this acclaimed actress who makes the flick such a joy to watch.

Throughout the movie, we are privy to a number of hallucinations that Thatcher witnesses of her late husband Dennis. Jim Broadbent takes on this challenging role, and for the most part does it justice, honing in perfectly on the mindset of Thatcher decades after her reign as PM to become a harrowing reminder of her past and her reluctance to move on from the actions and consequences of her campaign. Even for those viewers such as myself who do not share a profound knowledge of the Thatcher era and the dangers within it, through Broadbent we at least get a tantalizing glimpse into the mindset of this modern icon in The Iron Lady, and the only crime is that in the second half of the movie the arc of this conceptual hallucinatory character is a little skewed, failing to reach its full potential thanks to a lack of any thorough investigation of Dennis' demise and its effects. I understand that any ambitious production such as this must bring with it some ambiguity, some incentive for its viewer to research its background, yet I do feel there was more to be gained from Broadbent than was managed in the poignant concluding segments.

All the same, as well as boasting some impressive direction that occasionally borders on reaching the quality of Tom Hooper's The King Speech (a flick which clearly has served as an obvious inspiration for this), there's some brilliant filmic storytelling going on here. Each and every flashback is handled masterfully, in no small part due to the ace supporting cast that encompasses British legends such as Olivia Colman, Anthony Head, Richard E Grant and Iain Glen, each of whom add an extra ounce of quality to the entire production every time they appear on screen. Few films can rally together such a talented ensemble of Brit actors, so it says something that Pathe and their team managed to do so for what could easily be viewed as quite a small-scale film in retrospective.

In the end, I reckon that your reception to this film is going to eventually depend on both your political allegiances and indeed your view of how controversial characters should be portrayed by media such as this production. Many critics have expressed disgust at the extreme level of pathos which is presented to someone who they clearly did not support in her divisive campaigns, whereas many viewers such as this will revel in this pathos, as to me at least it creates a genuine sense of empathy and connection in a world where afflictions such as dementia and cancer are becoming such an alarmingly common part of life. So while I think Broadbent's Dennis could have been exploited a little further in his character arc, nevertheless The Iron Lady is a captivating production that does what it sets out to do with magnificent aplomb, and leaves me just as eager to see what British filmmakers can come up with next as The King's Speech did in 2011. Bravo!
4.5/5

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