The Iron Lady swims and sinks

The Iron Lady (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Phyllida Lloyd. Starring Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Richard E. Grant.

A fictionalized take on the life of British PM Margaret Thatcher made mediocre by storytelling problems.

Like Thatcher, The Iron Lady is carefully composed. It's visually interesting, stylish, and sleek, with the exception of some electric guitar-backed news footage montages that bring to mind a cheesy BBC drama.

The content is kept trimmed to well under two hours, and the movie doesn't drag like most biopics.

Meryl Streep is typically outstanding as Thatcher, a role that pushes her not only far from her ordinary self but also across a huge personality spectrum within the character: from an unsteady cabinet minister just coming into her own to an iron dictator to a declining 83-year-old. It's the best performance I've seen this year.

Equal credit ought to go to the makeup crew, who wrap Streep and her co-stars in some of the most convincing - some of the only convincing - age makeup in film history. It's thin and subtle and moves with the actors' features, in stark contrast to the rubber mask effect of the year's other major biography film, J. Edgar.

Like J. Edgar, this movie is not a fawning portrayal of its subject. It's no coincidence, certainly, that the dominant image in a film titled The Iron Lady is of that lady as a frail, senile old woman growing distant from her children and left chattering all day at a hallucination of her dead husband. Her life story is told through pitiful flashbacks to better times.

This decision is responsible for most of what's wrong with the film. Depicting Thatcher's arrogance, her coldness, her temper tantrums - all of these are a justified and necessary part of creating a portrait of the woman. But focusing on her slow decline years after she faded from the public eye feels a lot like kicking her when she's down.

No doubt the filmmakers don't see it that way. Showing her at her weakest is perhaps an attempt at making the audience sympathize with a woman famous for having no heart - or if not to sympathize with her, then to at least feel sorry for her. But this is misguided, mostly because as a framing device it simply doesn't work.

What, after all, is the point of this? What extra insight are we given by seeing 83-year-old Thatcher reflect on moments in her life instead of just seeing those moments on their own? What relevance does her later dementia have to her years as a politician? These scenes contribute little to the package except perhaps a weak statement on their subject's lifetime of isolation.

The device goes from unnecessary to raving mad in the final minutes when it becomes almost a literal ghost story - now we watch Thatcher struggle to dismiss the spectre of her dead husband, as though a degenerative brain disorder is something that can be overcome by force of will.

The life stories of public figures rarely make good films, because that nuisance called "reality" so often gets in the way of the plot. This is not the problem with The Iron Lady, which is strongest when telling the Greek tragedy of Thatcher's political career - a story of a woman brought to power by her ambition and brought down by her hubris - and weakest when it resorts to a purely fictional account of her later home life. A better, braver film might have let the story stand on its own.

Rated PG-13 for compassionate conservatism.
3 out of 5