The statesman and the woman, the austere and uncompromising political figure (openly contested by the British engagè cinema of the eighties and nineties) and the old widow suffering from Alzheimer's, power and fragility, iron and butter.
It's really them, the iron and the butter, the two distant and symmetrically antithetical faces of a single medal, the Margaret Thatcher played by a camouflage Meryl Streep, which the film by Phyllida Lloyd (former author of Mamma Mia, again with Streep), to be released in Italian cinemas on January 27, wants to tell the spectators.
Indeed, in the intertwined montage, images of the political career of the "grocer's daughter" (as some opponents contemptuously defined her), from the rise that would lead her to become the first female British prime minister until her fall, passing through the Falklands war and the indefinite strike of the miners (who surrendered unconditionally, after a year , Thatcher's hard line), alternate with those of the sweet eighty-year-old widow invaded by memories of a glorious past, inert to her own memory, who imagines she still sees her dead husband (played by Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent), while having breakfast.
The film, which perhaps pays a little for the lack of a selection, of a reduction of the field which would have led, in the face of a smaller extension, to greater depth and incisiveness in the topics, ends like this to draw a discontinuous but fascinating portrait of an extraordinary life, a nuanced picture that in some passages is also beaded with interesting reflections on the exercise of power.
One clearly cannot fail to mention the usual, extraordinary Meryl Streep who manages, in his absolute adherence to the original model, to enrich it with further nuances, radiating the entire film with his skill. The wonderful performance of him was already awarded with its umpteenth Golden Globe, and at the night of the Oscars she will present herself as a probable favourite.
