PG-13, 105 min.
Director: Phyllida Lloyd
Writer: Abi Morgan
Starring: Meryl Streep, Jim
Broadbent, Olivia Coleman, Alexandra Roach, Susan Brown, Harry Lloyd, Iain
Glenn, Nicholas Farrell, John Sessions, Anthony Head, Richard E. Grant
Why would you make a film
about an historical figure and make it mostly about her life as an old woman
with dementia after her retirement from public service? I don’t know how
accurate the details about Margaret Thatcher’s dementia are here, but the movie
treats her time as a pioneering female politician in British Parliament and as
the first female Prime Minister as a highlight reel, while concentrating mostly
on her as an old woman who hallucinates her long dead husband as she finally
tries to let him go.
If you’re going to make a
movie about an old age dementia driven romance, why chose one of the most
notable public figures in recent history? There’s so much to tell people about Margaret
Thatcher, why tell this? I was really disappointed in the content of this film,
if you hadn’t yet gathered that.
The really strange thing is
that it’s very well made. It features another amazing performance by Meryl
Streep, but I can’t help but wondering if she had thought the film would take a
different direction than it did. If I were cast in a role as an important
political figure, I would want the film to be about her political life, not her
dementia in retirement. The dementia could make a good framing sequence, which
is what I expected from the beginning of the movie, but it takes front and
center as the details of her historic career as a politician is sidelined for
the most part. I learned nothing about Margaret Thatcher the politician that I
didn’t already know, and I didn’t care about her dementia as much as the
filmmakers obviously wanted me to.
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