No 'Play Dates' with the PM -Iron Lady Falls to Anna Quindlen Doctrine:

Finally a review of "Iron Lady" that can be trusted. It goes beyond tiptoeing about the female "King Lear" allusion.

This review gets to the chronic allegory that is too easily extruded from Hollywood and especially from the "Alar Expert" Streep.

Great mimicry and make-up make for an interesting spectacle, but not great acting and certainly not a great film. I'll pass on this one and wait to see it on a smaller screen.

Margaret Thatcher transcended sexism. She was an inspiring figure and speaker for both the British and Americans. She was the steadying hand on the helm of Ronald Reagan's ship of state when it needed course correction during the Cold War. She was human, and much more, and in no way deserves to be trivialized.

I hope to see a review by Claire Berlinski. ♘

Iron Lady Falls to Anna Quindlen Doctrine: Virginia Postrel - Bloomberg

By Virginia Postrel Jan 12, 2012

....

Contrary to the critics, framing Thatcher’s story with her current dementia, which her daughter has written about, is not intrinsically disrespectful. Nor does it necessarily undercut her accomplishments.

The problem, rather, is that grafted on to what could be an affecting story of greatness and decline is an invidious, and gratuitous, moral. Call it the Gospel According to Anna Quindlen, the writer and columnist who enshrined its maxims in a commencement speech she wrote in 1999 and eventually turned into the best-selling book “A Short Guide to a Happy Life.” “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office,” she instructed. “Don’t ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: ‘If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.’”

Karmic Payback

The film presents Thatcher as just such a rat -- a woman who too zealously pursued public achievement and spent way too much time at the office. Rather than universal loss, the loneliness of her old age represents a kind of karmic payback for her hubris in seeking to leave something more to history than her genes.

We get the first hint of this message as the elderly Thatcher wistfully watches home movies of her young family playing at the seashore. “You can rewind it, but you can’t change it,” Denis counsels. (Long dead, he’s a figment of her imagination who serves, as former Thatcher speechwriter John O’Sullivan observes, as the film’s version of a Greek chorus.) What exactly would she want to change? ....

-Read on at link-