2012’s The Iron Lady portrays Margaret Thatcher in her decline, suffering  from dementia. It’s not exactly the most respectful treatment, given Thatcher’s leadership of England–she served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990.  Yet The Guardian argues that the film actually makes her too sympathetic, as though it doesn’t demonize her enough.  

Dementia

Meryl Streep’s Thatcher is portrayed as suffering from hallucinations–she sees her husband who has passed away and carries on banter with him.  Is this is a realistic portrayal of dementia?  My research shows that yes, it is.  Hallucinations can be a part of dementia, both auditory and possibly visual.  According to the Alzeihmer society of UK: 

“Hallucinations can be extremely distressing, and can lead to the person with dementia becoming frightened and in need of support.”

In this view, the hallucinations of someone suffering from dementia are not necessarily as charming as what we see in The Iron Lady.  At any rate, it’s nothing to make light of. 

Margaret Thatcher Portrayal

The Guardian writes that Iron Lady presents a  “defanged, declawed, depoliticised Margaret Thatcher,” as though to suggest she actually had fangs.  What they would like would be a film to excoriate everything Thatcher did and stood for.  But that wouldn’t make such an entertaining movie, I’m afraid, and in comparison to what I guess liberals would have liked, The Iron Lady is pretty balanced.  

The Guardian also implies that the film whitewashed Thatcher’s latent racism, because she once at least sympathized with Brits who felt “swamped by an alien culture.”  Here’s what Thatcher actually said: 

“Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.”

Indeed, Thatcher was not a fan of what was then termed “coloured immigration.”  It’s not a salient subject of The Iron Lady, but there is one scene that tends to confirm Thatcher’s grim view of immigration as we can divine from the above interview.  It seems that her government attempted to step the flow of immigration, and that the great mass migration came to Britain after she was deposed.  If you’re not happy with the blessing of diversity in Britain, don’t lay it at the feet of Margaret Thatcher.  But I will leave that to others to debate–in the comments if you like.   

With that being said, the film does make a nod to the rapidly changing demographics of Britain; namely, the opening scene in which Thatcher goes to a bodega with an Indian at the counter listening to foreign tunes on the radio, a black man behind her looking harried, and the elderly Thatcher, donning a headscarf, looking vulnerable and bewildered as she buys milk. 

In this scene, we see Thatcher totter back to her home, with cars whizzing by, rubbish thrown haphazardly on the city street, we feel that she has been betrayed; that we have not kept true to ourselves. In this regard, The Iron Lady is a tragedy, one of Margaret Thatcher, and one of England.  If that’s too dramatic, let me say instead that when I encounter a dignified elderly person, I want to apologize for how the world has gotten worse, and anyway, that’s the same emotion which The Iron Lady evoked in me.  

A Touching Theme 

Meryl Streep’s Thatcher in The Iron Lady is a sympathetic elderly woman who misses her husband and can’t let him go–I do find that to be a touching theme.  But notice how no conservative can be portrayed as doing something heroic in a biopic. So I suppose this is the closest we’re going to get.  

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