It’s always fascinating but unsettling to see living people walking around on the big screen — Stephen Frears’ masterful portrait of The Queen springs to mind.It’s disturbing to think that the person concerned, along with their nearest and dearest, must be watching this.
I gather the Thatcher clan sat this one out, wisely I think, but they may have sneaked a few peeks through the cracks between their fingers.
The other principal in the tale, is the shade of Denis, who is not entirely buffo. He flits in and out between arias with kindly but piquant saloon-bar comment.There goes the Falklands war, and in a furioso aria, La Thatcher tongue-lashes an Argentine dictator, a US Secretary of State, and her own lily-livered crew.
As the aria fades, Denis slides gently onto the sofa behind MT and says something like “well, that saved your bacon, didn’t it old girl.”
You get the idea.
At heart la Thatcher is an ordinary human being with a penchant for occasional Churchillian verbal spasms. Early on she stages an epic breakout, and gets as far as the paper shop where she discovers, horrore! milk is now 49p a pint. This treatment is kindly to the point of patronising, a kindness for those of us still traumatised by her Spitting Image. It’s free with the facts but that could be its greatest strength.
What about Thatcherism, though?Well what about it? Nothing to it, really. That could be why, in real life, her foundation went bust a few years ago.
Mrs Thatcher’s lifetime achievement turns out to have been holding on tight to the memory of a much-admired father, and living up to his instincts and slogans courageously through an escalating variety of challenges — a thoroughly decent thing to do, but hardly the basis for a new kind of world government.
In 1964 Geoffrey Barraclough observed
contemporary history can only justify its claim to be a serious intellectual discipline and more than a desultory and superficial review of the contemporary scene, if it sets out to clarify the basic structural changes which have shaped the modern world. These changes are fundamental because they fix the skeleton or framework within which political action takes place.
This film is no work of contemporary history. It does not clarify the structural changes that have shaped the modern world. As various chickens come home to roost, sending the wheels flying off the whole neo-liberal free market panjandrum Mrs Thatcher and her friends honestly believed in and represented, perhaps the same can be said of “Thatcherism” itself. But that’s a judgement for historians a few years hence. For now, just enjoy the show.Meryl Streep's performance is as amazing as everybody says, and if your taste runs to opera verismo in a Barret Home, Signora Thatcher e Denis could well be the production of a lifetime.










