Review of The Iron Lady (2011) by Captainchaos — 31 Jan 2012

This was a surreal portrayal of the first lady prime minister and one of the longest serving ones, basically portraying her as a dementia patient, and the only thing missing was the fuzzy slippers and ratty bathrobe.

My largest complaint is that rather than telling the story of this extraordinary woman's history, the movie must have spent about 30 minutes of time just showing her mucking along in an elderly dazed state.

I saw this movie with a Feminist friend, almost totally apolitical, and she could not follow the story at all, because the flashbacks weren't even purely chronological and didn't explain any of the political backdrop.

Other Feminist friends have panned this movie as showing that you can be the strongest woman in the world, but only at the price of no one ever loving you or standing by you at the end. Meryl Streep's performance added very little since most of the time she was representing a dementia patient rather than a former prime minister.

The only part of the movie that added any unexpected value was that it sort of explored a bit of the relationship with her former husband, but it was just done so bizarrely, as to be beyond artistic.