FILM REVIEW/ The Iron Lady

Meryl as Margaret, at the doctor's office.

I cannot imagine being a celebrity. Actually I can imagine it and that's why I would never seek fame. Even people who do good and add to the world in a positive way are eventually pilloried and made to look foolish so the rest of us can feel better about ourselves. Take, for example, the film The Iron Lady, about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (Please, I beg of you, take it .... far away.)

An oldie released in 2011, the lead role earned a Best Actress Oscar for Meryl Streep. Good for her, but bad for everyone watching.

My interest in the film at this late date arose from seeing The Crown on Netflix, wherein Thatcher is played brilliantly by the actress Gillian Anderson (who won an Emmy last year for her performance) as a tough, strong and formidable leader. I was eager to learn more about Britain's first and only female Prime Minister, who held that office longer than anyone else including Churchill, and who I had all but ignored while she was in office.

In The Iron Lady, we see Thatcher mostly as an old bat in a fat suit, frizzy wig and wrinkly, sagging face makeup, dressed in a baggy nightgown and doddering around her apartment either mumbling or shouting at hallucinations of her dead husband who she thinks is still alive. Streep gives it her all as a pathetic lunatic in the throes of dementia, with lengthy flashbacks to her as a young woman who is not Streep, and a middle-aged woman who is Streep but with obvious fake teeth later used in Bohemian Rhapsody for the fake Freddie Mercury. 

Back and forth, forth and back we go, often from frame to frame. It's hard to keep up, and really quite laughable, if not groan-worthy. To say I hated this movie is silly: I despised it and wanted it to die. But most of all it made me angry that so many people were involved in such a sloppy production intent on showing Great Britain's most influential politician of the 20th century as a blithering, blabbering, blubbering, doddering old lady suffering from a terrible disease. 

The title should have been The Melting of the Iron Lady. Thanks, Hollywood, but I'll stick to Netflix.