‘Iron Lady’ lacks weight, depth

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Jim Broadbent stars opposite Meryl Streep in “Iron Lady,” a biopic of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The film, written by Abi Morgan (“Shame”) and directed by Phyllida Lloyd (“Mamma Mia”), fails to live up to the promise of Streep’s performance

Updated: January 10, 2012 5:32PM

IRON LADY ★ ★ 1/2

Though Meryl Streep’s performance as the iron-willed (and occasionally iron-fisted) British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is richly detailed and compelling, the same can’t be said for this surprisingly superficial and unfocused bio-drama.

As a political leader, Thatcher was a wildly polarizing figure, much loved and much hated. You might expect that “Iron Lady” would reflect one or the other of those sentiments, but screenwriter Abi Morgan (“Shame”) and director Phyllida Lloyd (“Mamma Mia”) seem to have decided to side-step that potentially limiting issue by telling the story of Margaret Thatcher: Human Being.

Unfortunately, that approach comes with considerable limitations of its own.

“Iron Lady” is set roughly 15 years after Thatcher was forced out of office in 1990 by members of her own party. The first indication of how remarkable Streep’s performance is going to be is that fact that she is hardly recognizable while playing Thatcher as a little old lady complaining about the cost of a quart of milk at the corner grocery.

The woman who dominated Britain’s Conservative Party during the 1980s, who declared figurative war on labor unions and led her nation into the real thing after Argentina’s 1983 invasion of the Falkland Islands, whose economic policies caused rioting in the streets and whose policies regarding Ireland led to numerous retaliatory bombings by the IRA, is now an octogenarian in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. She spends her days wandering through her home under the watchful eye of minders as she fondly bickers with her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent) — who has been dead for years.

That’s an interesting setup: One that’s not that far removed from our first view of the aged and diminished Charles Foster Kane in “Citizen Kane.” But “Iron Lady” doesn’t seem to have any easily identifiable agenda. At least, not in terms of juxtaposing Thatcher’s glory days as a powerful player on the world stage with her latter days as a forcibly retired redundancy, who has to be reminded she is no longer the prime minister and chides her husband for getting into bed with his shoes on.

No, nothing that obvious, or that useful, as a means of putting Thatcher’s life into some sort of perspective, however arbitrary, is going on here. Instead, “Iron Lady” suggests that Thatcher’s relationship with her husband is the one thing that’s really on her mind years after her political life has ended — along with fond memories of her grocer father, a great believer in English self-sufficiency and pluck who inspired her political ideals.

That’s kind of a sweet idea, and it does serve to provide a through line for her political career, since he proposed to her after her first failed bid for Parliament in 1950 and was indeed her closest supporter until his death. And Streep’s scenes with the always-welcome Broadbent are certainly charmers, even if he does say “Steady the bus, old girl” one too many times. Trouble is, Thatcher’s reveries about early dates with her husband and remarkably happy marriage, along with guilt at having put her political ambitions ahead of family, push aside the most dramatic events of her career.

Worse, it means that we get little sense of what it must have taken for Thatcher to break down the barriers of gender and class and battle her way to ultimate power. Only one scene (in which her humiliation of a cabinet member leads to a palace coup) shows that Thatcher had teeth and claws and was more than willing to use them.

Instead, “Iron Lady” presents Thatcher as a sterling example of old-fashioned, stiff-upper-lip values, whose determination to do great things, combined with fierce self-discipline and determination, allowed her to triumph over the old-boy network, trade unions and more, eventually paying off with a portrait in 10 Downing Street, right next to those of Winston Churchill and Lloyd George.

And Streep, pulling out all the stops as she did playing Julia Child in “Julia & Julia,” is convincing enough to make us believe it. Almost.

Surely, there is much, much more to be revealed about the Right Honorable Baroness Margaret Hilda Thatcher.