The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011)

It was inevitable that casting Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher would infuse the erstwhile Prime Minister with too much of the milk of human kindness, as would seeing her in early dementia, having conversations with her dead husband. But then this director is not ideologically driven to dance on Thatcher's grave, obviously wanting to present a portrait of ageing instead, and the combination of Streep's subtle performance and a series of evocative flashbacks to phases of her personal and political life works well in this regard, albeit that the nitty-gritty detail of her political beliefs is somewhat glossed over in the process. A male director might well have focused more on the big events of her tenure to cover this, but then also missed out on the basic truth of the character, namely that being a steam-rollering ideologue is not inconsistent with being a visionary of sorts too, nor that it is possible to care deeply for a few and simultaneously be empathically quite out of touch with a multitude.

6/10