BEFORE: Meryl Streep completes a quatt-row (that's like a three-peat, only one higher) and I think there are no more films with her in them that I want to see, unless she makes another one before I finish.
Hmm, Streep has played three powerful women in the last four days, and one sheepish one. Not sure what to make of that.
THE PLOT: An elderly Margaret Thatcher talks to the imagined presence of her recently deceased husband as she struggles to come to terms with his death while scenes from her past life, from girlhood to British prime minister, intervene.
AFTER: I understand that it's tough to make an interesting biopic. Sure, you can just start at the beginning of someone's life and move forward, but that doesn't really work because you probably want to get to the interesting parts a lot faster. So writers and directors mess with the time-stream to make things more novel, or they start at the end and use a framing device, such as someone telling the story (like in "Amadeus") which results in a story that's very flashback-y, but hopefully more fast-paced and intriguing.
THIS film, on the other hand, chose to start at the end, but the framing device is Margaret Thatcher having flashes of memory, while she suffers from dementia. That's a horrible idea. Even if the flashbacks are more or less chronological, should we as an audience be relying on someone who's mentally slowly slipping away to remember everything correctly, or in the proper order? How can we trust anything that we see as the truth?
I, for one, know very little about British politics - as an American, I'm not even sure I understand the difference between a president and a prime minister, or what a prime minister's role is in a royalty-based system of government. And I know even less about what Thatcher accomplished, or failed to accomplish, during her time as Prime Minister. So it's really a shame that this movie doesn't see fit to explain any of that, or even try to. Instead it tries to get inside the head of one of the most powerful yet controversial political figures of the 20th century, which of course is impossible, so she still remains an enigma to me.
I know some people were upset when a Yank like Streep was cast to play Thatcher - I didn't really have any problem with her performance, I'm more upset over the fact that I didn't learn anything by watching this. OK, so she was a conservative - what does that mean in the U.K.? She apparently pushed for a flat tax, so I guess that explains why the lower classes (and several punk bands) despised her. And she was a woman trying to succeed in a man's world, politics. But she DID succeed, so therefore it was possible to do so, right?
But depicting her for so much of the movie as frail and feeble, having hallucinations of talking to her dead husband, and just getting continually lost in memories again and again, it makes me wonder if some writer or director got a thrill out of depicting her as weak, which I gather she wasn't during her political life. I'm not sure showing her this way is either the equivalent of a cheap shot, or just a really ill-advised way to structure a biographical film.
This is really the sort of narrative time-jumping that I'll only allow when a film is about time travel, and only then.
Also starring Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Cloud Atlas"), Alexandra Roach, Olivia Colman (last seen in "Hyde Park on Hudson"), Harry Lloyd, Iain Glen, Amanda Root, John Sessions, Anthony Head, Richard E. Grant.
RATING: 2 out of 10 car bombs
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