(already subscribe? log in).

Margaret Thatcher meets Meryl Streep in ‘The Iron Lady’

MOVIE REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 13, 2012|By Wesley Morris

In playing Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep wears a mollusk-shell bouffant… (ALEX BAILEY/WEINSTEIN…)

The best way to appreciate the high-ludicrousness of Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher might be to watch “The Iron Lady’’ with the sound down. All the scenes with Streep as prime minister seem like deliberate slow motion. She makes such insinuating eye contact that even to return her gaze leaves you feeling inadequate, judged. With this kind of acting you don’t even need silent-movie titles; her carriage says it all. Everything Streep does here is a seismic act of theater. If she so much as tilts her head, the earth tilts with it. She doesn’t simply overwhelm this thin historic biography - and the other actors around her - she detonates it.

This movie is so conventionally structured and conceived (it goes from Thatcher’s ambitious young adulthood to her greatest political hits) it seems to exist merely to justify the performance. It’s a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part. Here that invitation is the closest Streep’s come to camp. She dons Thatcher’s mollusk-shell bouffant, which is second only to the first Queen Elizabeth as the strangest red hair in the history of English leadership. She wears the crooked teeth and the pearls. She’s costumed in puce and eggplant and teal. She utters a lot of the famous lines, or versions of them: “The Falkland Islands belong to Britain, and I want them back!’’

Streep’s Thatcher speaks with a poise that’s not unlike the way some divas approach an aria. But when Streep isn’t singing, so to speak, she’s vamping. During the Falklands War in 1982, Alexander Haig (Matthew Marsh) comes to 10 Downing Street for a meeting and his reluctance to engage Argentina exasperates the prime minister. She gives him a speech about how he underestimates her, stands, swivels her head, and asks, “Shall I be mother?’’ She’s referring to whether he’d like her to pour him tea. But she’s not asking as a hostess, she’s asking as a leader. Streep obviously relishes playing a woman this powerful, this unfazed by the chauvinism afoot. She appears to love raising then narrowing her brow and popping her eyes as if she were Bette Davis in a slasher movie. This is good acting. It’s great kabuki.

The director Phyllida Lloyd and the screenwriter Abi Morgan don’t intend to clear the deck for Streep. But what they want to say about Thatcher is blurry. It’s loosely feminist, although that’s a term most feminists would object to seeing used anywhere near Thatcher’s name. But after exclaiming that she doesn’t want to die washing out a teacup, there she is restoring England to its status as a major world power.