Iron Lady Lite

Left: May 14, 1979 Time magazine cover of Margaret Thatcher
Right: Meryl Streep as Thatcher in the 2011 movie The Iron Lady

I don't mean to say that the Iron Lady was a lightweight. I mean that Meryl Streep, who impersonated Thatcher in the 2011 film The Iron Lady, was giving us an Iron Lady Lite.

I wrote in Camera Lucida when the film came out in 2011:

Meryl Streep will be channeling Margaret Thatcher for her next movie The Iron Lady. I've written about Streep's never-ending creative (almost musical) ability for mimicking accents. But, from the above photo, I doubt Streep will go any further than caricature, like her depiction of Julia Child in Julie & Julia. Streep doesn't even follow Thatcher's political philosophy. In fact, she may be against it. I think this will add to her turning Thatcher more into a cartoon rather than an all-rounded figure.

Streep's expression in the photo above, which appears to be the early promotional photo for the film, says it all. She has a deer blinded by headlights look, which I'm sure Thatcher never had even in her most difficult days. In fact, the film is about one of Thatcher's most challenging moments, when she protected the Falkland Islands from Argentinian aggression.

Here is a synopsis of The Iron Lady:

The film is reportedly set in 1982, chronicling 17 days of Thatcher's life leading up to the Falklands War and how she dealt with the events.

Larry Auster had a somewhat similar take:

While I am a big fan of Meryl Streep’s, I refuse to see her movie about Mrs. Thatcher. The reason is that I consider it totally unacceptable that the movie uses the pathetic debility of Thatcher’s old age against her. We all grow old if we don’t die young. It is monstrous and cruel to exploit the senility of a historical figure as a framing device for a movie about that person, as though the person’s senility—occurring, in this case, twenty years after the person left the public stage—showed the true meaning of her life and achievements. This is even more the case when the person is still alive and suffering.

Margaret Thatcher had been ill for many years with dementia.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat