Phyllida Lloyd's "The Iron Lady'

Tyrants have always been fascinating figures: Shakespeare's Richard III, Ben Jonson's Tiberius. Democracies exclude them— at least while they remain democracies— but part of the lingering interest in Richard Nixon is our sense that he had a genuine capacity for tyranny, and almost the luck to achieve it. Nixon is absent from Alan J. Pakula's 1976 Watergate thriller, All the President's Men, but his sinister presence, all the more potent for being unseen, penetrates every frame of that film.

(Dick Cheney, Nixon's closest disciple, had the wit to realize that in a republic tyranny is best exercised from behind the scenes, and through a pliable fool. His legacy survives.)

Absent our own Nero, we Americans make do depicting rascals instead. Clint Eastwood's recent J. Edgar is a case in point, and now from Britain comes The Iron Lady, Phyllida Lloyd's biopic of Margaret Thatcher.

The films bear a considerable resemblance, most strikingly in their sympathy for their subjects. If, as Sylvia Plath said, every woman adores a fascist, does every democracy hanker for an autocrat? After watching these films in fairly close succession, one does wonder.

Lesley Stahl's lesson

A personal confession: While living in England in the mid-1980s, I loved watching Maggie Thatcher pitch hay at the hapless Labourites during parliamentary question periods. She was superbly unflappable, everything a tyrant ought to be if one ever had to face an actual political opposition.

I remember, too, an interview she gave once to Lesley Stahl of CBS. Stahl had come armed with her note cards and follow-ups, and Thatcher reduced her to putty within 60 seconds as she carried on a tutorial for her hopelessly overmatched interrogator.

Jack Kennedy was charming with reporters, and Ronald Reagan disarming, but Maggie took no prisoners— not in the Falklands, not in the cloakroom, and certainly not with the media.

This was Thatcher in her prime: crushing labor unions, redistributing income to Britain's 1%, and injecting calcium into her good bud Ronald Reagan's backbone. Nowadays, however, Margaret Thatcher lives in the twilight zone of old age, which is where Lloyd chooses to introduce her.

Swarthy ethnic types

The opening scene shows Thatcher shopping for a quart of milk in a local mart, where she is rudely elbowed aside by swarthy ethnic types putting their own purchases first. Something's wrong here: Lady Thatcher (Meryl Streep) does her own shopping, and in such a down-at-the-heels neighborhood?

The scene sets up instant empathy and concern for the protagonist, and an equal measure of revulsion for the immigrant hordes who, it's broadly implied, have taken over Britain for good and who would as readily torch a city as push ahead in line— the one, for anyone who has ever experienced old school British respect for a queue, being nearly equivalent to the other.

As it turns out, Maggie has only sneaked out to shop on her own, for which she is rebuked (insult piled on injury) by her household staff. She's not living in a cold water flat, but in comfortable if nonluxurious circumstances, where she carries on conversations with her late husband Denis (Jim Broadbent). These she is clever enough to conceal from the staff, whom she can still occasionally fend off with a display of regality.

In short, she's every Brit's vision of a dignified lady in decline, dealing privately with loneliness through fantasy and clinging to whatever independence remains to her.

Churchill's spiritual child

At the other end, we are shown the young Maggie (Alexandra Roach), brimmingly determined to succeed in a man's world yet touchingly vulnerable. Margaret Thatcher was, as is well known, a grocer's daughter, and therefore born not only to the infirmities of her sex but the constraints of her class. Spiritually, though, she was Churchill's offspring, fuming at Britain's postwar loss of empire and influence, and the erosion of Victorian values in the go-go 1960s.

As a woman, she had a unique perspective on this situation: Britain's elites, she thought, had lost their spine, and it might take a modern Joan of Arc to put the man back into them. This was the role she dreamed of for herself.

Lloyd takes us, fairytale-style, through Thatcher's ascent to the leadership of the Conservative Party and her election in 1979 as Britain's first female prime minister— a victory by plurality as in her subsequent races, given the votes pulled from Labour by the third-party Social Democrats.

The final touches to Thatcher's persona as the Iron Lady were added by elocution lessons that deepened her voice and stiffened the pseudo-aristocratic accent she had adopted. The brief scene that alludes to this transformation has a touch of The King's Speech to it, not to mention Shaw's Pygmalion, and Thatcher is perhaps best seen as a latter-day Shavian heroine, setting the world aright with precise diction and willed self-confidence.

(Of course, Shaw's women held progressive views, while Thatcher's views were— her demand for acceptance as an honorary male aside— thoroughly reactionary.)

Wimpish male ministers

The film takes us briskly through Thatcher's 11-year tenure as prime minister: the quixotic Falklands war, Britain's last independent military venture (though it had to be cleared first through Washington); the struggle with the Irish Republican Army; the breaking of the miners' union in the great strike of 1984. We see Maggie with her cabinet and with her generals, briskly issuing orders, firmly in control. Her adversaries are vaguely glimpsed, noisy mobs and retreating enemy soldiers.

These scenes convey just the faintest hint that the Iron Lady's free market fundamentalism may be causing a bit more distress than is strictly necessary, but the camera is off and running to the next crisis, from which Thatcher will as usual emerge self-justified and triumphant. Her wimpish male ministers, unable to take the heat, finally conspire to remove her as party leader, and their perfidy succeeds: a Revolt of the Eunuchs that puts one of their own, the colorless John Major, in power.

We see this turn of events coming at a cabinet meeting in which an increasingly isolated Thatcher humiliates her deputy prime minister, Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head), forcing his resignation. The mood in the room is cold rather than cowed, and we understand that Maggie has lost her touch— or, perhaps, succeeded only too well at being the only man in the room.

Left-wing fantasy?

A tearful household staff sees her out of No, 10 Downing shortly after, a scene that underlines the loyalty of the Little People despite the great betrayal of their betters. The film returns us to the present, as Maggie bids a sentimental farewell to the antic ghost of Denis, who departs shoeless for the underworld. At the end, Thatcher is washing out an empty teacup— a Proustian gesture in reverse for a woman whose memory, too, has symbolically gone, and for whom the rest will be silence.

The propriety of making this film while Margaret Thatcher is still alive, and particularly in portraying (however sympathetically) her dementia, has been much debated in Britain. Thatcher's children have denounced the film as "a left-wing fantasy," a criticism that is itself about as near a 180-degree turn from reality as possible. Although The Iron Lady takes no overt side in the controversies of Thatcher's career, its presentation of them is so cursory, and so thoroughly filtered through her own eyes, as to leave little room for any point of view but her own.

The decision to frame her career and personality through the soft edges of a distressed old age, moreover, sets up an automatic sympathy in the viewer. If Maggie can't be made lovable by any stretch of the imagination (though her Denis, at least, remains loyal even in death), she can be seen as plucky— and that, for Brits of a certain age and class, is still the highest of compliments.

Streep's double handicap

You can see Thatcher easily transposed into Downton Abbey, running the kitchen, the estate, or (discreetly, of course, and strictly behind the scenes) the country. At all odds, you can just imagine her take on the current Conservative leader, the bumbling, blustering David Cameron: All wet!

As the mature Maggie, Meryl Streep gives a bravura performance, although she should share the Oscar she will probably win with Roach. But for an actor, biopics are inherently limiting. You can't, as in a fictional role, create a character; rather, you must inhabit one already fixed in the public eye, and you are judged more on mimicry than invention.

Streep brings all her formidable intelligence to the job, and she is consistently convincing while avoiding the perils of caricature. For that, all credit is due, but one can't help more admiring than entering the work.

There's a double handicap, too, because another great actress got to play the Iron Lady before Streep or anyone else did. I refer, of course, to Margaret Thatcher herself.