COMMENTARY | Friends and relations of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were invited to a screening of a biopic of her, titled “The Iron Lady,” to gauge their reaction. That reaction was, putting it mildly, furious.
Stories that “The Iron Lady” was going to be a hit job on Thatcher had been circulating since the script was leaked last year. But according to the accounts of the film published in Mail Online, it is worse than anyone could have imagined.
Apparently the greatest prime minister Britain has had since Winston Churchill is depicted as a crazed old harridan who hallucinates about her dead husband and has been driven mad by the memories of the Falklands War and the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s. It is far from the reality of the woman.
Pathe Entertainment, which is producing the film, justified its introduction of fiction by claiming that “The Iron Lady” is a cautionary tale of the pursuit of power and the price one pays for it. What it really seems to be is a cautionary tale of what happens to someone who is a great, decisive, conservative leader. If one’s enemies cannot get you when you are still in office, they will try to trash your good name any way they can.
Reagan was treated the same way in a vile miniseries that ran on the Showtime Network. Oliver Stone treated George W. Bush as a goofy loon who somehow became president in his flop of a movie “W.” And, of course, a film was made about Bush’s hypothetical assassination.
Time was when great leaders were treated with something resembling respect on the big or small screen, and some still are if their politics are the correct kind. How many glowing biopics have there been about John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, both great men in their way, albeit with all too human flaws?
One suspects that a film version of the Obama account of his early life, “Dreams of My Father,” will be produced, even if as expected he goes down in flames in next year’s election. The next Republican president, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, or whoever, will get nothing unless it is some kind of grotesque, fun house mirror account of somebody who looks like them, has their name, but doesn’t resemble the real person in the least.
How did popular culture fall into the hands of people capable of making something like “The Iron Lady”? And, more importantly, how can it be reclaimed?
Sources: New Thatcher Biopic, Starring Meryl Streep, to Trash the Iron Lady, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, July 19, 2010
Friends revulsion at film that portrays Lady Thatcher as ‘granny going mad’, Simon Walters, Daily Mail, August 21, 2011