Expect to see a similar nasty portrayal by Julianne Moore in HBO’s “Game Change.” Moore confesses that it was hard to find a good side to Palin, and the miniseries is candid that her ambition outstrips her capacity. Hollywood knows well that you only get one opportunity to introduce these figures of national or international import, and they intend to make it bad impression on their behalf.

So it is with Lady Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” whose creators have ridiculously compared Meryl Streep’s Thatcher to a modern-day King Lear in their disgusting attempt to dance on Thatcherism’s memory.

“Iron Lady” producer Harvey Weinstein, director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan are engaged in a caricature of conservatism, through a caricature of Lady Thatcher and all those around her. Weinstein has even claimed that Thatcher is a “social progressive,” as if being pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro-national health service were all there were to Thatcherism.

Alas Weinstein and Streep never show us Thatcher’s considerable economic and political successes, preferring to spend two-thirds of the film luxuriating on her old age. This is as fictional as it is slanderous. We simply do not know how Lady Thatcher is doing because she has lived a life far removed from the press.

This is a subtle project, but a thorough one. Here are but a few problems with the film:

• Thatcher’s cabinet is portrayed as a bunch of Tory grandees, when, in fact, Thatcher appointed a record number of Jews to help bolster the meritocracy that her policies made possible. She also included homosexuals, too, though not in the ostentatious way that the professional homosexual left would like.
• Her husband, Denis Thatcher, is portrayed an oafish figure played by Jim Broadbent, rather than the rogue, debonair former Artillery man who lamented that he did not see action in World War II. Thatcher loved him because he was a remarkable man, “with a certain style and dash.” When he died Thatcher eulogized him thusly: “Being PM is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be – you cannot lead from a crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend.”
• Never once is anyone else given credit for inspiring her. F.A. Hayek, the inspirer of Thatcherism, ever discussed. Nor is Keith Joseph, who coached her. Nor is Enoch Powell who had a sort of Thatcherism avant la lettre. Nor is the Centre for Policy Studies, which, like a Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute of its day provided the theoretical heft for her free-market ideas.
• Thatcher is portrayed as the only Lady member of the House of Commons. This is also wrong and more than a tad insulting to the memory of MPs like Barbara Castle, Judith Hart or Harriet Slater.
• The Soviet menace, which Thatcher worked to undo with Reagan and Pope John Paul II, is ignored.
• Her daughter, Carol, is portrayed as taking care of her, when, in fact, she spends much of her time in Switzerland. Not surprisingly, Thatcher’s family rightly rejected an invitation to watch the film.

But the most spurious attack of the film is on Thatcher’s politics. It tries to portray Thatcher as somehow a rugged individualist who had to suffer the loss of power that she so coveted. The fictional young Thatcher declares, defiantly, that she will never wash a tea cup but in the end she’s brought down to earth, washing tea cups as if all of her actions were for naught.

But Thatcher would have been the first to tell you that her successes were from the community that raised her, the largely Jewish constituency that retained her, and the philosophy that animated her, not from some sort of “we’re all on our own” libertarianism.

That’s why the film does not include Immanuel Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of England and Thatcher’s spiritual adviser who knew full well that a reduction in the state would see a rise in communities looking out for their own. Thatcher and Jakobovits wanted to strengthen “the moral sense of the people,” as Thatcher put it, through religious institutions, not through the state.

While Thatcherism relied on “economics…[as] the method; the object is to change the soul,” and so, her project was necessarily religious. The Orthodox rabbi had come to Thatcher’s defense in 1985 when he rebutted a blistering, 400-page report on Thatcher’s government by the Church of England. Thatcher’s government, the report held, was anti-poor and therefore anti-Christian and immoral. Jakobovits rightly disagreed. The Jewish and the Thatcherite contribution to poverty reduction, “would lay greater emphasis on building up self-respect by encouraging ambition and enterprise through a more demanding and more satisfying work-ethic, which is designed to eliminate human idleness and to nurture pride in ‘eating the toil of one’s hands’ as the first immediate targets.” He, like the very Christian Thatcher, blamed the trade unions for Britain’s woes, writing, “The selfishness of workers in attempting to secure better conditions at the cost of rising unemployment and immense public misery can be just as morally indefensible as the rapaciousness of the wealthy in exploiting the working class.”

The rabbi and the prime minister shared the belief that “self-help” was the “means whereby we make ourselves useful.” Helping oneself by helping others, without the meddlesome state, is what Thatcher believed.  (To those seeking a corrective to this cinematic slander, I recommend the excellent BBC series, Tory! Tory! Tory!, you can watch all episodes here, for free.)

Enoch Powell, the Tory genius and one-time possible prime minister whose work Thatcher knew well, said it best when he said all political lives end in failure. But “The Iron Lady” makes a fetish of Powell’s statement, never once showing that her fights with the unions were as necessary then as they are now.

—–

Most of the film annoyingly examines Demented Thatcher in her later years. Oh, the lingering, gratuitous shots of Streep in her confused wanderings! Why should we gaze inside this (completely fabricated) frail, crazy character? It’s the only way to tear her down. The filmmakers, seemingly confused about her actual, incredible successes, focus on her dementia and femininity while categorically denying her capability.

The grand economic prosperity Britain experienced during her service is covered briefly as flashing newspaper headlines, which strangely look damning from the liberal viewpoint–“Maggie’s Millionaires” and the like (what the liberal philosophy fails to recognize is that when the rich get richer, the poor get richer, too). There is no Reagan, save for a brief hallucination of dancing with him. There is a passing shot of Gorbachev. And the Falklands incident is dealt with as a tragic piece of history that she somehow managed to emerge from well. Predictably, the Armed Service personnel were for a war, while everyone else, including the United States, advised her not to escalate.

In her miasma, Demented Thatcher recollects her past as a series of political triumphs that simply serve to emphasize her failure as a human being. Maggie was reviled by most everyone who came into contact with her, including family and cabinet members. Her husband, (the love of her life), was affectionately civil to her – but only in her hallucinations. In real life he often called her “MT,” a not so veiled reference (by the filmmakers) to her presumed emotional state. How else could a woman break the backs of the unions in Britain but by reckless conceit and a complete absence of sympathy? Through all her accomplishments, her family is not depicted as being proud of her for a moment. Even her own daughter screams that everything is always about Mum’s political aspirations. Her husband leaves for South Africa, and the hallucination later asks how long it took her to notice he was missing. It is an extremely poignant scene when her son calls from South Africa to say he won’t be coming to visit. She seems only mildly fraught by his rejection. She’s the Iron Lady, after all. She must be a cold, heartless b*tch.

This misguided film also asserts that she was a creation of the men around her; she’s only a woman, after all, so there must be some explanation. Reverence for her father’s political viewpoint drives her to serve. When Denis proposes to her, she explains her devotion to public service and vehemently proclaims she won’t die cleaning a teacup in the kitchen sink (It’s almost like a religion to her – disgusting!). When she finally decides she must run, “just to shake things up,” she herself doesn’t actually believe she will win the Prime Minister’s seat. She has two (male) handlers who do. They teach her to talk more like a man and make her change her hair. They also suggest that she lose the double strand of pearls around her neck, which she adamantly refuses, explaining they were a gift from her husband and calling them “the twins.” It’s cute; she confuses an inanimate object (jewelry) with her loved ones. She’s such a girl.

The pretext for the movie is that she finally decides to clean out the late Denis’s closet, prompting her hallucinations of him, and several times throughout the film she fights with him and commands him to leave her alone. But at the end of the film, when her hallucination walks away from her, she is distraught. She breaks down, lost without her man (the one she didn’t notice was gone when he was alive, for those keeping score). Oh, the irony we find when we construct it!

After painting her as a frigid power monger and a pawn of the men who influenced her, the filmmakers then ask us to believe she suffered dementia long before she left office (there was always something wrong with Maggie…).

But then she really wasn’t to blame for what she did, was she? Yet we are encouraged to fault her. It’s the typical liberal conundrum.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the preoccupation the director shows with Maggie’s shoes. There are so many shoe-shots in the film, it’s downright laughable. When she leaves number 10 for the last time, the shot lingers long enough on Streep’s walking feet it made me wonder if there was a shoe fetishist behind the camera. She wasn’t Imelda Marcos, after all.

And the final scene of the movie: Maggie washes out her teacup in the sink. How tragic! Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah! The filmmakers could not resist that final, petty, hate-filled blow.

Because Streep is a consummate professional and not a historian, “The Iron Lady” is almost convincing. But if you know an iota of history, you’ll recognize it as a misogynistic piece of fantasy, concocted to retell the story of one of the greatest women in recent memory from the liberal/progressive/feminist viewpoint. I suppose anything else from Weinstein, Streep, and the “I Hate Maggie” Left Coast would be disappointing.

The arrival of a serious film about a serious conservative presents liberal reviewers with a quandary. When the film trashes the conservative, that’s great – the slander in and of itself is good for at least a star on its own, and if the boom mikes aren’t looming in the frame and the actors don’t forget their lines you’re guaranteed at least a three star review if only in the name of socialist solidarity.

But if the movie, as some say happened here, refuses to take a position on its subject, then there’s a problem for the liberal reviewer. As we shall see, they tend to handle it by simply inserting their own limousine liberal insights into the review. Somewhere, sometime, someone must have lied to them and told them that the world gives a damn about the political views of guys whose job it is to discourse upon movies that feature singing chipmunks, space robots and/or Ashton Kutcher.

No one is really sure about what might happen in the third theoretically possible situation. It will be interesting to see how liberal reviewers respond if Hollywood ever makes a major movie biography about a prominent conservative that views him or her in a positive light.

The reviews for “The Iron Lady” are mixed, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a 55 percent score by the critics.  Not surprisingly, the critics are having a tough time sticking to the substance. Many of them just can’t resist taking a whack at her – as if she had not spent her career being hit harder by better.

Roger Ebert, a reflexive leftist whose pinko opinions usually saturate his movie reviews, wrote a thoughtful review here. He objected not to the opinion the film held of its subject, but that the producers seemed too timid to offer any opinion at all:

Was she a monster? A heroine? The movie has no opinion. She was a fact. You leave the movie having witnessed it. Whatever your feelings were about Thatcher were before you saw it, you now have some images to accompany it.

Love him or hate him, that’s some sharp writing. If true, it represents a valid criticism and is the kind of keen insight one looks to a reviewer to express. But, of course, Ebert could not resist a long digression into lefty/peacenik silliness over Thatcher’s steadiness in the face of Argentine aggression in the Falklands which then morphs into a lament for her heartlessness:

Thatcher held office for an unprecedented three terms, bitterly divided Great Britain, and led her nation during the Falklands War, which seemed to be largely an exercise in hubris on both sides. Before the war (and now), no one frankly gave a damn about the Falkland Islands, and Thatcher’s foreign policy amounted to: “They’re ours and you bloody well can’t have them.” For this brave troops on both sides were killed, and those who cared to could deceive themselves that there was one small spot of foreign soil that, as far as Thatcher was concerned, would be forever British. (Footnote: The British didn’t consider it foreign.)

Of course, Argentina started the war by invading the Falklands, over which it had disputed Britain’s claim since 1833. You can’t say they didn’t wait long enough before taking action. And if Argentina mounted a military invasion, what could Thatcher do? She was compelled to defend the islands. The loved ones on either side who lost someone in that war must have been hard-pressed to understand why death was useful or necessary.

That wasn’t Thatcher’s concern. In a striking scene that takes place in her increasingly senile old age, she declares that ideas are more important to her than feelings. That seems to have been a governing principle in her life, allowing her to look with apparently limited concern at unemployment, hunger and homelessness on the domestic front.

Ebert’s feelings about British policy of the 1980s really aren’t the issue – we just want to know if “The Iron Lady” is any good. But like all liberals, Ebert seems to think we’re dying for his insights on politics when the important question is whether we should drop $40 for seats and popcorn to watch this flick.

Lesser reviewers likewise join in the Thatcher-bashing. You’ll be shocked to learn that Karina Longworth of the Village Voice resented Thatcher not being presented with horns and a pointy tail. Variety accepts the unexamined premises of the community it serves, showing why it is Hollywood’s own Pravda when reviewer Leslie Felperin fumes that “[m]uch is made of how Thatcher broke through the glass ceilings of gender and class on a personal level; rather less is said about how her policies disadvantaged the poor.”

While it’s no shock that Slate’s Dana Stevens thinks that it was Thatcher’s “policies of economic deregulation and union-busting that dismantled Britain’s social safety net,” I expect that British subjects taxed into poverty to support the bloated behemoth of cradle-to-grave socialism on that sinking island would be shocked to hear about this alleged “dismantling.”

Cole Smithey (“The Smartest Film Critic in the World”) sugarcoats it by labeling Thatcher one “of the Right’s most reprehensible examples of absolute power corrupting absolutely,” raising the important questions, “Who is Cole Smithey, and why should I give a rat’s ass what some hipster doofus with a website and a subscription to The Nation thinks?”

He also asserts that “Thatcher contributed to the world’s current economic collapse with a cunning brand of daring cruelty that defies logic and reason,” forgetting that the lefty Labor Party had some small part in running Britain after Thatcher stepped down in 1990. I particularly enjoyed his characterization of how “Thatcher’s heavy-handed military response in the Falklands rightly paints her as a warmonger.”

He seems to have forgotten that Argentina invaded the Falklands, not vice versa, but then he seems to have grown up in an age where wussy school administrators suspend both the kid who starts the fight and the one who fights back. Smithey opines that “[h]istory will not be kind to Margaret Thatcher,” a threat I would find more chilling if Smithey’s comments betrayed any familiarity with history.

With all the hyperventilating about the subject of the film, it’s hard to get a straight answer to the only question we really want to hear these critics answer – should we pay to see the movie?  We still don’t really know.

The New York Times: [emphasis added]

Ms. Streep said, laughing: “We’re not interested in King Lear’s politics. We’re not saying we would have voted for him.” She added: “What interested me was the part of someone who does monstrous things maybe, or misguided things. Where do they come from? How do those formulations begin, how do they solidify, calcify, become deficits? How do a person’s strengths become weaknesses? Look at me. I tend to go on too long. I’m a little dogmatic, and that could get really awful over time. If you are self-aware, as actors are, you let these things go into your pores, including criticism. I hate being criticized.”

Ms. Lloyd said: “So did Margaret Thatcher. But that’s understandable. She couldn’t show weakness. Imagine what the men would have said.” She added: “In parts of England now it’s a transgression even to consider her as a human being. She’s that monster woman, the she-devil. For me the point of the film was to find the human side.” And though hardly a Tory, she said she vividly recalled the moment when Mrs. Thatcher came to power. “Just as I remember not voting for her, I remember sitting in my room at university when the radio announced that she had been asked to form a government, and I went ‘Yes!’ It felt like one for our team.”

Ms. Streep nodded and said: “I did the same thing. We all thought if it can happen in England, class bound, socially rigid, homophobic — if they can elect a female leader over there, then it’s just seconds away in America.”

Gee, I really want to run out and support the movie now.

What about you English “homophobes?” Don’t you want to support Ms. Streep? After all, she is so much better than you.

Streep is brilliant, fully validating the decision by director Phyllidia Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) to go with an American actress in portraying an Englishwoman of such long familiarity. So it’s odd to find this technically complex and naturalistic performance encased in such a resolutely old-fashioned, Hollywood-style biopic. I half expected to see Thatcher bumping into Greer Garson’s Madame Curie in one of the film’s many dream-world reveries.

The movie dutifully ticks off the highlights of Thatcher’s career: the rise of the provincial grocer’s daughter through the Conservative Party ranks to the top of the political order; her facing down of the powerful trade unions whose strikes were threatening to paralyze the country in the early 1980s; her condemnations of socialism and unflinching defense of free markets in the face of hooting derision in the House of Commons; her handling of the 1982 Falklands war, in which Britain controversially prevailed; and her unyielding condemnation of bomb-planting IRA terrorism. (“We have always lived alongside evil,” the PM says. “But it has never been so impatient, so avid for carnage, so eager to carry innocence along with it into oblivion.”)

Read the full review at Reason.com

Yet a historian says the film is already causing Brits to reconsider Thatcher’s legacy – both as a feminist icon and a ruler of consequence – weeks before its U.S. release. Could it do the same stateside?

Historian Amanda Foreman has already seen Meryl Streep’s work as Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” and Foreman wrote a Newsweek article about the film’s potential impact. She shared her thoughts with C-SPAN host Peter Slen earlier this week:

SLEN: What’s the current opinion of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain? What’s the current mood about her?

FOREMAN: The current opinion. Well, I think that the film actually has prompted a massive rethink of Lady Thatcher. That most people, I think, shared my opinion, that it was someone who had been in power 20 years ago that she was a big towering figure, but was like an out-of-control Sherman tank, and was bossy, and loud, and seemed to create more discontent than anything else. And this film has reminded us that she was also a great feminist pioneer who changed the face of the world in terms of what it was possible for women to achieve, and that she ended the Cold War. And those are two things, that I know I somehow managed to forget.

Yet, not surprisingly, these three gals conveniently chuck feminism aside in regards to three others gals (Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Margaret Thatcher, respectively) whose political views differ from their own. Somehow, I must’ve missed the asterisk providing an exception to the feminist cause:  ‘Thou must support thy sisters – unless, of course, said sisters disagree with you politically.”

Barkin v. Bachmann: Barkin’s Twitter feed (which rivals that of Alec Baldwin’s in its unrestrained slamming of the right) repeatedly attacks conservative female figures. During the December 15th GOP debate, her vicious tweets revealed this actress is a feminist in name only. Blasting even Fox News’ gorgeous Megyn Kelly, a superstar network anchor and successful working mom (“This Megyn Kelley has more Botox in her f*ckin face than a 57 year old actress, Just sayin.”), Barkin saved her best sneer for Bachmann: “Don’t u just love when Bachmann says “When I am president…”? That’s like me saying… “When I am performing my next heart transplant….”  Odd, one would think Ms. Barkin, political-views aside, would have more respect for a woman who:  is a sitting member of Congress and presidential candidate, successfully raised 5 children and fostered a whopping 23 children. If Bachmann isn’t a poster girl for strong female women, I don’t know who is.

Moore v. Palin: Only a few days later, four-time Oscar nominee Moore, while interviewed about her upcoming hatchet job on Sarah Palin (the HBO mini-series “Game Change”), was asked if she’d developed a new-found respect for Palin after researching the former governor. The actress curtly answered, “No.” Again, how odd for a feminist to find absolutely nothing to admire in Palin. Politics aside, this is a working mother with five children who became governor of Alaska, a vice-presidential candidate and a superstar in the political world. Yet Moore found not one thing that impressed her about Palin? Though Moore does not tweet often, she did, curiously enough, find time to retweet Barkin’s sneer about Bachmann. One can almost hear the high-school-style giggling between these two so-called feminists.

Streep v. Thatcher:  Perhaps most shocking of all is the lack of respect by Streep towards Margaret Thatcher. Surely, one would assume that, at the very least, every feminist would have some kind words to say about the grocer’s daughter who rose to become one of the world’s sole female leaders and the UK’s first female prime minister? Think again. In press interviews for her Thatcher biopic, “The Iron Lady,” Streep bestowed no praise on her protagonist. On the contrary, she remarked the film was about a life in “decay” and touched upon the “cruelty that was there and how she [Thatcher] came to pay a price for it,” giving no examples, of course, of said “cruelty.”

Unbelievable.

These Hollywood mean girls either need to step out of their snickering clique long enough to give credit where credit is due or turn in their feminist card.

What do you all think?  Any other examples of so-called feminists attacking strong women of the right?

Roach’s Thatcher is the awkward but determined young woman who first enters the political system, while Oscar-winner Meryl Streep conveys Thatcher as the leader who rattled England’s political system during the 1980s.

Neither Streep nor Roach appear to be fans of Thatcher’s political career, but Roach says starring in the movie opened her eyes to a part of Thatcher’s legacy she can’t help but admire.

Asked whether she sympathized with Thatcher, Roach said, “I’m an actress so I wanted to play her as truthfully and as fully as possible. I was definitely not judging her. We don’t agree on a lot of things, but when I was filming at the Houses of Parliament and I had all these older men around me in dark suits, it kind of struck me what she did for women, what she did as a woman. She came from a humble background. To come from that and have ambition and drive, just knowing what she wanted out of life, you cant help but admire that.”

Roach’s upcoming films include “Anna Karenina” and “Trap for Cinderella,” both due sometime next year.

You can read the rest of the Indiewire.com interview here.

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Daily Mail:

Many feared the worst when they heard Meryl Streep was to play Margaret Thatcher in a new film.

Not only was Baroness Thatcher to be cast as a rather befuddled, elderly woman looking back on the triumphs and disappointments of her life, but Streep is also of a very different political hue from Maggie.

It was commonly agreed that our greatest Prime Minister since Churchill would be vilified.

Such fears are misplaced. Having just seen the film in a London preview before its release in January, and then having spoken at length to Meryl Streep about her role in The Iron Lady, I can state categorically that the doomsayers were wrong.

Streep’s portrayal will, I have no doubt, come to be seen as magnificent portrait of Lady Thatcher.

And when I spoke exclusively to the double Oscar-winning actress about playing her, she declared herself to be in ‘awe’ of Lady T, adding that this was the biggest role she had undertaken in her career. ‘It took a lot out of me, but it was a privilege to play her, it really was,’ she told me.

‘It was one of those rare, rare films where I was grateful to be an actor and grateful for the privilege of being able to look at a life deeply with empathy. There’s no greater joy.’

The 62-year-old star, who was in London to see the completed film, explained how she admired Thatcher’s willingness to stand and be leader, a decision which meant she had to offer her life, and her family’s, ‘on an altar’ to the public good.

MailOnline world exclusive: Scroll down for a first look at the official Iron Lady trailer

‘I still don’t agree with a lot of her policies,’ said Streep. ‘But I feel she believed in them and that they came from an honest conviction, and that she wasn’t a cosmetic politician just changing make-up to suit the times. She stuck to what she believed in, and that’s a hard thing to do.

Telegraph:

The depiction of Lady Thatcher as a stooped old lady in a headscarf contrasts with her appearance during her most recent public outing.

Dressed in a trademark blue suit, she beamed for the cameras as she celebrated her 86th birthday last month with her son, Sir Mark.

However, the extent of Lady Thatcher’s mental decline was laid bare by her daughter, Carol, in a 2008 memoir.

Miss Thatcher told how the combination of dementia and a series of minor strokes had reduced her mother to a shadow of her former self: struggling to finish sentences or to recognise family members.

Miss Thatcher also disclosed that her mother frequently forgot that Sir Denis died in 2003. “I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again,” she wrote.

We will know the answer on December 30th.