The Iron Lady (Blu-ray)

I was so disappointed by this movie, as it was a lost opportunity to tell a great story. Most of the time is wasted on showing a senile old Margaret Thatcher bumbling around her apartment with hallucinations of her late husband and flashbacks of her life. There is very little context given around the events she dealt with, why they happened, and how the outcome did or did not improve things. Most viewers under 45 years of age won't be old enough to remember these events to have any of that context. It is disgraceful that the portrayal of a strong woman has to focus on her senile old years at the cost of the impactful ones. Meryl Streep did a wonderful job as usual and her performance gets 5 stars. I hope that someday someone will actually tell this story properly.

This movie was such a disappointment. I’d heard so much, when it was out in theaters, about how great it was and it was on my bucket list for a long time. Finally get around to watching it and was just not clear on what all the hype was about. First of all, it was very slow paced. It jumps around in time, from showing Mrs Thatcher as a doddering old woman hallucinating conversations with her long dead husband to showing a few scenes from her younger days that really didn’t lend much to the story to finally, about 2/3 of the way through, there is about 10 minutes of good drama depicting the Falklands war. The whole thing is done in such a tedious, disjointed fashion that the viewer is unable to develop any kind of emotional connection to what’s going on. Even when they show the event of her hotel being bombed by the IRA and she fears her husband has been killed by the blast, the viewer isn’t able to share her anguish because the relationship hasn’t been sufficiently developed through out the movie. When it ended, it was just a relief.

I love Meryl Streep and was very interested in a bio-movie about Margaret Thatcher. However, this film has a truly horrible script. I am amazed that someone actually got a ton of money to create a Hollywood movie with such a poor script (hey there, movie producers, if you have money to invest/waste in such bad scripts, I can guarantee that I can provide a movie script for you for half of what you spent on this one)and/or poor directing! As other reviewers have noted, it focuses mainly on portraying a doddering elderly woman suffering from dementia and nostalgia. Margaret Thatcher was one of the most powerful leaders of her time - how about focusing mainly on her accomplishments and challenges throughout her life?? The film then overuses flashbacks to try to show Ms. Thatcher's earlier life, but without providing any time, location and other important identifiers for viewers to be able to understand what the flashback is showing. It's like a really poorly-stitched together patchwork quilt - it looks crappy and falls apart at the seams. We watched 15 minutes, skimmed ahead to see if it would get any better, realized it would not, then quit and went on to watch something else. Meryl Streep's immense talent is wasted on this poorly-executed attempt at a film.

Many well-written reviews that address the issues with the film so I won't delve into all that. Interestingly, to me it seems as if someone (the screenwriter and/or director) had it in for Thatcher and did their best to portray her as someone who loathed hollow, self-serving ambition yet was consumed by such. The snake swallowing itself. I'm not someone who follows politics so I can't say if history is treating her fairly or not. Remember her words in the beginning when she meets her husband-to-be and is certain she would never become one of "them". The film shows her success as her greatest failure. There was little focus on other important characters, her husband, children, because it's showing that's how she must have treated them throughout her career. She made good her words to Dennis the day he asked her to marry him. She would not be a stay at home mom or good little wife who doted on her family. This film wasn't about her political career but about her failure in the most intimate moments of her life, to her own family.

Streep was extraordinary. Her dramatic opening, an elderly Thatcher, solo, walking briskly down the street to fetch a carton of milk. You felt an immediate urge to escort her!As a GI I witnessed some remarkable changes happen at the start of "Maggie's" decade... A short section of A12 road to London perpetually under construction, workers pathetically slow at a unionized rate. British Telecom taking the better part of a year before finally installing a phone line to my flat.When Thatcher announced privatizing government owned telecommunications in '82 which was called British Telecom. It instantly attracted investors and supplied a great mountain of growth for Great Britain. I lived far up north away from London in a Gainsborough landscape where I served twin RAF airfields. At the end of '82, I remember the exotic sight of young women at bus queues already shouting near-Scottish brogues into "cellphones" - the lucky Brits got cellphones before Americans did.Despite holding big bulky mobile phones in small hands, the young women still looked very cool. A small grocer's daughter made that happen.

This movie features one of he finest performances by Meryl Streep. I remember the Thatcher years and Meryl seems to have got her character very well.However Abi Morgan who wrote the screen play seem to wish to dwell inordinately on Thatcher's later years when she suffers from dementia. The message presumably was that no matter what greatness someone achieved in life, time would be cruel and get us all in the end. Not a bad approach if judiciously used but this is overused so often that the poignancy is replaced by irritation.The screen time would have been better used on the Miner's Strike which rated only one or two lines in the Movie. The Movie covers her early years, the IRA bombings and the Falklands.Overall the film is not as good as it could have been. It has some great moments but the interesting points on Margaret Thatcher's life are not all covered and sometimes glossed over.

Ten minutes into watching this film I was beginning to think I wasn't going to go the distance such was its initially laborious pace. Then, something changed and I slowly began to warm to it. Soon after that I found myself fully engaged with this film and ended up enjoying it immensely.A life's retrospective viewed via flashbacks is nothing new and yet I found director Phyllida LLoyd brought something fresh to the concept, perhaps by somehow reducing or disguising the predictability of such a format but also, I think, because the starting point is so utterly alien to most viewers who feel they've 'known' Margaret Thatcher for a large part of our lives. And yet did we? Once she eventually disappeared from British mainstream politics I think the vast majority of us simply switched off from this 'yesterday woman'. Why would we take any notice as she aged and then gradually deteriorated heath-wise?Obviously, Margaret Thatcher was, still is and always will be a divisive figure and yet the Russian nickname of 'The Iron Lady' is so incongruous with the very idea of a retired, elderly and physically fragile lady (however 'scratchy' certain ladies may become as age withers them!) that marrying sympathy or empathy with this particular elderly lady (dependent, of course, upon one's own take on Thatcher and her legacy) can, I imagine, for many be a bit of a struggle.Perhaps this is where Phyllida Lloyd succeeds as I was able to empathise with this character and indeed feel warmth towards her. I remember admiring Thatcher dispassionately at the height of her powers in 1980's Britain while also disagreeing vehemently with several of the policies she orchestrated during this period. But I never felt a connection with what seemed to me to be a very cold fish on both domestic and world stage. I rather think Phyllida Lloyd wasn't particularly aligned with Thatcher's politics either and yet she was intrigued enough to look deeper when approaching this retrospective view on MT. I thought, to her credit, that Lloyd was very fair in her treatment of The Iron Lady.The keystone to the film, of course, is Meryl Streep's highly-convincing performance in the title role which is probably as close as any actor will ever get. The makeup and mannerisms are almost spot on, apart from just the odd moment here and there where Streep somehow resembles a slightly startled Ken Dodd (no, honestly, have another look!) but it's the voice approximation where Meryl really nails it. Very few American actors can successfully 'do' a definitive British accent (Robert Downey Junior is another) but Streep is uncanny in this respect.From initially 'giving it a go' to thoroughly enjoying and engaging with the film I would therefore recommend it to others regardless of your feelings towards the Margaret Thatcher who so dominated so many of our lives.

Bit boring, and having lived through those times was very reluctant to buy it...the best thing about it is she goes mad at the end, as confirmed by her daughter Carol ( not a favoured child, but ended up looking after her when she got dementia), in an article I've not seen, because it was in the Tory rag: Daily Telegraph..there was so much more they could have told but chose not to...the acting was good...poor Carol, being stuck with that demon and a brother (Mark) who just doesn't care except for himself..no wonder with a mother like that, Carol got off lightly but I bet she won't see it that way! Great to see that the TERROR of the world, got her comeuppance, but I didn't need to buy the DVD for that.

Some virtuoso acting performances and clever casting to create striking physical appearances of historical figures bring pack memories which despite the passing of time have not been too deeply buried. Although Thatcher was an extremely controversial person, there is a spirit of tolerance in this film which was sadly missing in the political debate at the time, and is tragically even more absent today not only in this country

What can I say, excellent film, portrayed a wonderful lady and a great leader; Really enjoyed the film!