It seems to be the season for quasi-political biopics: The Iron Lady, J Edgar, and W.E. have all graced our screens of late. I have no desire to see the latter, but I have made it through the other two. J. Edgar is a wee bit on the overblown and dull side. There is a tentative and slightly half-hearted attempt to explore a possible relationship between Hoover and his right-hand man, but unfortunately the movie itself is so clearly uncomfortable with it that this just ends up a bit snigger-worthy (and indeed, there was a certain amount of sniggering from the audience when I went to see it). Oh, and then there's the latex. Making no-longer-quite-so-youthful-as-he-used-to-be Leonardo DiCaprio and the gorgeously smooth skinned Mr Armie Hammer (as Clyde Tolson) into doddering old men by means of a truckload of latex does nothing to stifle the sniggers. The score, such as it is, was composed by the director. Someone really needs to take Clint Eastwood to one side and point out that whilst he writes a lovely moody jazz-inflected melody, he really is a rank amateur when it comes to scoring films, and his rather uneven music does nothing to lend this film the modicum of pace it so desperately needs. I suspect that the type of clout he has in Hollywood makes that kind of conversation rather unlikely.
The Iron Lady is a mighty strange film. I enjoyed it; it is musically interesting; I was disturbed by it on a number of levels.
Enjoyment: the entire cast turn in jolly fine performances. Jim Broadbent is a delight as the ghost of Denis Thatcher (!), and of all the people might have I expected to crop up playing Geoffrey Howe, Anthony Head (best known for playing Giles in Buffy and Frank N Furter in the Rocky Horror Show) was not high on my list, so that was a little treat; plus Richard E Grant puts in a marvellously unctious turn as Michael Heseltine. Its generally well paced, there is humour and pathos, as a work of fiction it has much to recommend it.
That, of course, is where the first level of disturbing kicks in, as this is not entirely a work of fiction but a very odd biopic of our longest serving prime minister. Love or hate Maggie, I have to side with the critics who have used the word "tasteless" to describe making this film whilst she is still alive, because a substantial amount of it takes the form of a fictional representation of what she is like now. The film is ostensibly set in almost exactly the present, as we are told that it is 8 years since Denis died (he died in the summer of 2003); and much of the film is centred around Margaret, suffering from dementia, hallucinating that Denis is still living with her. She knows he is dead, she knows that other people cannot see him and that talking to him therefore makes them regard as her loosing her marbles, and the end of the film sees her quite literally sending him packing - she bags up all his clothes to go to Oxfam, but packs him a suitcase, with which she sends him off into the bright white light. Unmitigated fiction, whatever we may or may not know about her current mental state. The other part of the film, therefore, is her flashbacks to particular episodes in her past, getting her place at Oxford, fighting and losing her first election, meeting and marrying Denis, getting to parliament, deciding to run for leader of the party, and various episodes from her time as prime minister, notably the miners' strike, the Falklands, and the poll tax riots (so many happy memories of my teenage years and university days) before being ousted as leader in 1990. All things considered, I would have liked rather more of this than the fictional elderly Thatcher shuffling round her flat in her dressing gown.
Disturbing level 2 is that this all makes her very sympathetic. I would not claim not have strong emotions about Thatcher, even thought she was a significant presence in my formative years (I was 12 when she came to power, 23 when she left) and I blame her personally and her Great Education Reform Bill (the largely forgotten GERBill) of 1988 for the mess that the English education system, both schools and universities, currently finds itself in; but I was never one of the rabid Maggie haters. Nonetheless, I am a little disturbed by how much I like, how sympathetic I find the Meryl Streep version of her.
Anyway, MUSIC! That's what I'm supposed to noodling about, and this is actually not at all bad. For me, the interesting stuff is the music that is used within the story itself, and there are two principal pieces here. One is "Shall we Dance" from The King and I, which we hear at several points, and is positioned as a piece of music that Thatcher likes, and that she shared with Denis - but it has a nice little element of commentary, the idea of the not-high-class woman who finds herself among powerful men and gives them a piece of her mind, who changes the way they do things and (literally or otherwise) gets them dancing to her tune. The second interesting piece of music acts as a counter balance to this, because while again being something sung by a woman, this time it is the cultural and emotional opposite, but still has a parallel element of commentary. This is the opera, Norma: early in the film, we see young Margaret, not looking very comfortable at all, at a performance of Norma with Denis and a lot of men in suits. Norma is a typical 19th century opera in which the woman dies at the end; but Norma herself is a woman with power, the high priestess of her people, who is betrayed by the man she loves and voluntarily sacrifices herself at the end to atone for having loved him (she's a priestess, you see: not supposed to do that). In the scene near the end of the film where Thatcher leaves Downing Street for the last time, having resigned as prime minister, she does so to Norma's most famous number, "Casta Diva", and so it evokes that idea of having been betrayed and falling on her sword when required. "Shall we dance" gives us the happy, empowered Thatcher; Norma the betrayed one. I do so like it when there is a very clear reason for having chosen a particular piece of music in terms of making little comments on the narrative! Go music editor! (that normally being the person who makes these choices, and in this case, the plaudits therefore probably go to James Bellamy and Tony Lewis, but it's very hard to know....)
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