The Iron Lady

Movie trailers are a skilled industry all of their own designed to you entice you into the cinema. So slick and well made are trailers nowadays that they often outshine the film they advertise. Too often movie trailers contain the best bits so that the film itself is a disappointment. Sometimes the trailer, which makes the film seem so enticing, turns out to focus on one aspect making it quite misleading of the film as a whole.

I think that the latter applies to trailers I have seen for 'The Iron Lady', the new drama about Britain's former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Those trailers show Thatcher (Meryl Streep) in full flight which at least suggests that the film's focus is Thatcher's political career. There is certainly nothing in the trailers to indicate that perhaps half the film, maybe more, is set in Thatcher's retirement with dementia set in.

James provides strong argument that the dementia scenes provide direct references and triggers to Thatcher's political hay days and his argument is persuasive yet I thought it telling that he also found the film a 'little boring'. I reckon that is because of the amount of time spent on the dementia years. Half an hour or so into the film and with there yet to be much specific focus on her pre-retirement days, I was impatient for the film to get a wriggle on.

The film's best sequences, in my view, were those relating to the Falkland Islands war. The film's focus was entirely on the events at the time with some terrific news footage of the day thrown in to great effect. It was the most vibrant section of the film. I wish there had been more scenes of that nature.

Nevertheless, I think this is a fine film, beautifully acted and Streep is quite magnificent.