The Iron Lady(2011)

Submitted by Julio M

Oscar Winner: Best Actress – Meryl Streep ; Best Makeup & Hairstyling

The film covers a bulk of the life of the late, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep), who came to be known as “The Iron Lady” for her tenacity as a British ruler and key political figure of her time, as well as her harsh uncompromising in her postures and beliefs. The narrative goes back and forth between the dawn of her life -as she appears old and afflicted by dementia, and constantly commiserating about her achievements and regrets to what turns out to be the ghost of her deceased husband Denis (Jim Broadbent)- and her early years as ambitious, aspiring Margaret Roberts (Alexandra Roach), from a small town girl to a proud member of the very elitist and heavily male-dominated Conservative Party.

She gives up Chemistry studies at Oxford College in favour of Politics and eventually manages to gain a seat in the House Of Commons. During this time, she meets and marries Denis Thatcher, a well-known businessman. He is impressed by her charisma and outspokenness, and she clarifies to him, from the beginning, that “she does not intend to die washing a teacup” -this, meaning she would not ever settle with being a mere reflection of her husband and a sidelined cutesie housewife-.

She is seen escalating positions within the party, going from a standout Member of Parliament to Minister of Education under Sir Edward Heath’s (John Sessions) Government to challenging -and winning- the Leadership of the Conservative Party, after which she completely redid her image to the iconic looks and voice everyone has remembered her for since. Intertwined with these achievements, we see present-day images of the abandonment she seems to be subject of, and the apparent total indifference of her son Mark and the marginal attention her daughter Carol (Olivia Colman) dedicates to her.

Eventually, Thatcher runs for Prime Minister in the General Election of 1979 and wins by a landslide; but her 11-year tenure is heavily defined by a plethora of crises and historical happenings that managed to make her, both at once, a respected and reviled figure among the public opinion, both within and outside the United Kingdom. Some noticeable ones are the unemployment crisis of the early 1980s, the 1981 Brixton Riots, the Falklands’ War sustained against Argentina in 1982, the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, the Grand Hotel Bombing of 1984 in which she and Denis were almost killed, her closeness to figures like Airey Neave (Nicholas Farrell) and Ronald Reagan and the British economic prosperity of the late 1980s. All the while, she had to face a great mounting deal of pressure and opposition from within the very inner ranks of the Party, even from those who had been originally loyal to her.

By 1990, she reaches a critical point when, especially after coming up with the widely rejected “Poll Tax” and being openly opposed to the integration with the European Union, her Deputy PM Sir Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head) resigns in protest to her bullying attitude and fellow Party member Michael Heseltine (Richard E. Grant) challenges her for the Leadership. Aged, inflexible, growingly impopular and abandoned by most of her former colleagues, she is left with no other choice but to resign as Prime Minister, something she perceived as an act of treason and from which she reportedly never recovered. She is seen leaving Office, heartbroken and teary-eyed.

Towards the end of the movie, Thatcher is seen packing Denis’ belongings for the last time, while they discuss about him leaving. As his ghost leaves her forever, she breaks down admitting she is not ready to be left completely alone, to which he retorts “she would be fine on her own… like always”. The last scene shows her begrudgingly washing a teacup by herself in her kitchen, precisely the thing she had dreaded in her youth when she first married Denis.