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The Iron Lady [DVD]

Meryl Streep (Actor), Jim Broadbent (Actor), Phyllida Lloyd (Director) | Rated: Suitable for 12 years and over | Format: DVD

3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (214 customer reviews)

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Product details

Actors: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Olivia Colman, Alexandra Roach, Anthony Head
Directors: Phyllida Lloyd
Writers: Michael Hirst
Format: PAL
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired: English
Audio Description: None
Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 2.35:1
Number of discs: 1
Classification: 12
Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
DVD Release Date: 30 April 2012
Run Time: 104 minutes

Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (214 customer reviews)

ASIN: B004U5BXK2
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 751 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)

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Reviews

From Amazon.co.uk

Phyllida Lloyd, who directed Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!, takes a less exuberant tack in this unexpectedly poignant biopic. In the script, written by Shame's Abi Morgan, Lloyd depicts the elderly Dame Thatcher (Streep in a thoroughly convincing performance) as a frail figure replaying key moments in her life while her mind still continues to function. Her trajectory begins with grocer Alfred Roberts (Downton Abbey's Iain Glen), who became the mayor of Grantham, instilling in his daughter, Margaret (Alexandra Roach), a passion for politics. After graduating from Oxford, she felt ready to enter the fray, at which point she met Denis Thatcher (Harry Lloyd), who cheered her along on the road from Parliament to 10 Downing Street, where they lived during her time as Britain's first female prime minister (Jim Broadbent portrays the grey-haired and ghostly Denis). While closing mines, dodging IRA hits, and overseeing a war, the blue-clad titan built alliances with Airey Neave (Nicholas Farrell) and Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head), but she would lose them both. If her will was strong, she had no time for feminine niceties like conciliation and forgiveness. The film goes on to suggest that she never cultivated the kinds of female friendships that might have sustained her in retirement, though her daughter (Tyrannosaur's Olivia Colman) did what she could. Instead, Denis remained her closest confidante until his departure, after which she had nothing but fading memories. The upshot is an uneasy combination of admiration for her leadership qualities and disappointment in her interpersonal skills. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Product Description

Nominated for four BAFTAs including Leading Actress and Supporting Actor, The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep, tells the compelling story of Margaret Thatcher, a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world. The story concerns power and the price that is paid for power, and is a surprising and intimate portrait of an extraordinary and complex woman.

"The movie event of 2012"--The Mail on Sunday
"Exhilarating"--The Daily Telegraph
"Extraordinary"--The Financial Times

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Touching 8 Jan 2013

By ReviewBlog51

Format:DVD

After watching 'The Iron Lady' on television recently, I enjoyed it enough to buy it on DVD.

Whilst I am no supporter of Margaret Thatcher, this is a fantastic film and Meryl Streep's performance was indeed worthy of an Oscar. Her portrayal of the former Prime Minister (1979-1990) was uncanny and her battle with dementia truly moved me, politics aside, I felt for her as a human being. Jim Broadbent was also excellent as Thatcher's deceased husband Dennis.

It has to be said that if you require greater knowledge of Thatcher's time at No. 10, you would be better off watching a documentary instead (I recommmened BBC's 'The Downing Street Years'). This is because the viewer doesn't really find out about that side of things, famous events like the miners' strike are touched upon all to briefly.

Having said that, Meryl Streep is fantastic and I really enjoyed 'The Iron Lady', it does portray her in a sympthatic light but does remind the viewer at times of the hurt that some of her policies caused people.

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108 of 123 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful Portrayal 6 April 2012

By Carl Spencer TOP 1000 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE

Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase

I can't understand all the negative reviews for this film. I can only assume that people are writing out of bitterness for what Thatcher did whilst in Government, or bitterness that she's been portrayed with a weakness by the film. At its core, this movie isn't about party politics, or policy decisions, or whether what Thatcher did was right or wrong - it makes no judgements at all - but rather it is about Margaret Thatcher as a woman and as a human being.

The story is focused on a present day Margaret Thatcher, suffering from mild dementia and portrayed as a woman somewhat out of her time period. Through her illness, she experiences flashbacks of her past and her rise and fall in politics. We see her go from promising young politician from an ordinary background, to a female MP trapped in the world of men, to a pioneering Prime Minister, to someone who has been in power too long and begins to lose her way.

Whatever you might think of Margaret Thatcher and her Government, the point of this film is to portray the woman as honestly as possible and, for the most part, it achieves that. It isn't a Conservative, Liberal or Labour fuelled film and it isn't anti or pro Maggie. It allows the viewer to make up their own mind.

The key to the movie is the older present day Maggie. We see a woman suffering from dementia and virtually alone. She has a slightly wayward daughter and a son who doesn't give a damn about her - symptoms of a life putting politics first. Meryl Streep's portrayal is exquisite. For most of the film, and particularly the modern day segments, you'll often forget that this is even an actress playing a part and get sucked in entirely.... Read more ›

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Idea, Brittle Execution 2 Feb 2013

By T. T. Rogers

Format:DVD

I think the idea of a filmic contrast between Margaret Thatcher at the height of her power and vitality on the one hand, and on the other the physically reduced Lady Thatcher of today, is good in principle, but in practice the director does not succeed and this just ends up looking facetious. What we are left with is a rather sad and aimless portrayal of a lady seemingly struggling through her winter years while reminiscing on better times. I think the director tries to be apt by inserting into Thatcher's daily interactions some jarring cultural references. For instance, in an early inexplicable scene, we see Thatcher pushed out of a grocery queue by an assertive yuppie-like extra. In another early scene, Thatcher overhears one of her care assistants complaining about how she does not always take her pills, etc. I can see what this is meant to do, but I don't think it's all that clever. To précis the point, the director probably thinks that Thatcher was the creator of a greedy, uncaring Britain and these scenes bring her face-to-face, Quixote-like, with the evils she wrought on society-at-large.

What is rather more clever about this film is the subtle but powerful contrast presented between Thatcher the 'anti-feminist' woman and those women (and some weak-willed men who support them) who have embraced a kind of 'bourgeois feminism' that seeks to advance the cause of women as people who can do 'men's work'. Thatcher was a great and impactful politician not because of what she was but because of what she did, as a woman yes, but in other terms as well. The female dimension was obviously important to her career, and her status as a woman in the proverbial 'man's world' became, I suspect, very significant at the end when she was ousted from power.... And even Thatcherism had a kind of stern, maternal sentiment about it, but in spite of all this, she did not explicitly identify herself as a female politician as such, still less as a feminist politician. She was just a politician, period. But in other ways Thatcher was subversive of gender. When she said things like: "You turn if you want to, the lady's not for turning", or when she railed against strikers or little men in Europe, it was more than Freudian metaphor. She was in fact speaking as a 'man' and embodying the best manly qualities that her male political friends and colleagues could not embody or express. She could do that because, after all, she was a woman. They could not do that because, after all, they were men. There is a line spoken by Meryl Streep that summarises this subversive attitude, and in my view, rescues the entire film. Streep has Thatcher saying: "It used to be about trying to do something. Now it is about trying to be someone." Exactly. Without that line, this would have been a bad, if not terrible, film, but with it this film rises at least to some level of comprehension. It is said that Thatcher hated feminism. I suspect it is more accurate to say she just didn't care about it. She would have regarded it as undermining informal institutions in society like family, yes, but more importantly, she would not have understood the relevance of feminism. She, after all, was an able and assertive woman in her own right who was capable of overcoming any artificial obstacles relating to her sex. She considered it her right to advance in a career if she wanted to. To her, and the very few women like her, feminism in its bourgeois form is largely an irrelevancy. She belonged to a generation of 'doers', whereas most people today (both men and women) are 'be'ers'.

I suspect the director is trying to blame the latter, more risible aspect of our society on Thatcher, but if so, I think that's hitting the wrong target. 'Thatcherism', as it became known, never had a strong social-moralistic dimension to it. The social attitudes that made a New Right government possible in Britain - an emphasis on individualism and personal moral reflexivity - had emerged in the 1950s and came to fruition in the 1960s. What we now like to call 'left-liberalism' refers to a 'liberal' attitude to personal morality. Changes in attitudes to sex represented the obvious and powerful 'achievement' of this movement. For instance, the 1960s notion of 'free love', was a way for men especially to disregard sexual behavioural standards and basically start sleeping around. The same applies to contraception for women (i.e. the pill). The pill enabled women to sleep around and it also undermined that other important sexual behavioural constraint: the family. It could be said that 'liberal' (free market) attitudes to economics often go hand-in-hand with 'liberal' (free market) attitudes to morality. In order to have the freewheeling economy Thatcher envisaged it helps if you have a freewheeling climate of morality. That's not to suggest that one requires the other or that this is what Thatcher wanted, but her own government was overtaken by these liberalising forces, and so that is her indirect legacy. She found it difficult to reconcile what were regarded as the necessary liberal attitudes to personal freedom with her own rather more stern and conservative moral and social outlook.

It is that disjuncture that is really the source of a popular confusion that has arisen about Thatcher and her legacy. The simplistic populist notion is that Margaret Thatcher was about 'greed', but this is not quite true. Unfortunately some of her own remarks did little to disabuse the notion: "There is no such thing as society", she once said. This careless remark (part of a much longer soliloquy) was leaped on by her ideological opponents as proof positive of 'uncaring Tories'. In fact, Thatcher's real problem was the opposite. As a product of post-War Britain, if anything she was inclined to care too much. She was in some ways an exemplar of the rational humanist. In that infamous quote, she was referring to the need to protect the moral, sexual and behavioural constraints that had previously existed in society: i.e. individuals and their families, religion, informal policing, and so on, as opposed to encouraging a reliance on government ('the state') to police and regulate our lives (which is what we have now, in the form of an overweening welfarist state and a suffocating PC culture). To Thatcher, the case for capitalism was more than a mere political argument. It was a profoundly moral case. If we remove the obviously more appropriate historic comparison with her nearest equal, Gladstone, the most apt recent comparison for Thatcher would actually be Gordon Brown, who, like her, is a 'moral economist'. Both believed in office that they were making a moral case (Brown explicitly used the term 'moral economy'), and both could not reconcile the reality that the population-at-large would not behave in the way that their 'moral economy' might prescribe. Brown wanted equalitarianism but the reality outside his comfort bubble is of a freewheeling society that could not and would not accommodate his thirst for compulsion, something that led to widespread and bitter resentment and popular dislike of him. Similarly, as Thatcher was busy 'freeing' up the market, other transformative social forces married with the new 'economic freedoms' of the 1980s to create a rather unpleasant society, a society that Thatcher herself understood very little. She had, unwittingly, unleashed Hell. In that sense, the disorientation that the director gives to Thatcher at times in this film is symbolically quite appropriate, even if the thinking behind it is slightly off-target.

The acting is terrific in this film: Meryl Streep puts in a first-class performance as Thatcher. One of the better special features on the DVD explains how Streep became Thatcher using make-up and prosthetics. What is also good during the film itself are the flashback scenes, especially those that go back to Thatcher as a young woman (actress Alexandra Roache, I think), but also the scenes of Thatcher in power. There is a reliance on the usual tropes about Thatcher as a veritable latter-day Boudica, which in fact she wasn't (see my Amazon review of 'The Downing Street Years'). Nevertheless, this film should have been centred more on this sort of stuff. Instead, we have a nasty portrayal of Thatcher as an old lady who is 'past it'. The problem is that the director has got caught up in her own artistic sensibility, wishing to portray a symbolic contrast between the Iron Lady of the 1980s which exists in the popular imagination and the (supposedly) doddering, weak, Brittle Lady of today. I think this is a mistake. I was also irritated by the constant use of Denis Thatcher as a character-narrator. I kept having to remind myself that he is actually deceased and that Thatcher is apparently 'imagining' him being there. Jim Broadbent is an excellent actor but the whole thing was distracting and just seemed a bit silly. What we needed was either an interview with the real Lady Thatcher about her legacy - I would happily sit through 2-3 hours of that - or a film of some kind portraying in a more serious way her reflections on her legacy and Britain as it exists today. We did not need to see an old lady struggling with a kind of Alzheimer's, trying to put on her clothes or hiding her pills. A more dignified portrayal would have aided clarity about the bigger, more important issues this film touched on but failed to explore. For that reason, what could have been an interesting film was ruined, and I just wanted this to end. Read more ›

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected at all 17 Mar 2013

By fat man on a bicycle

Format:DVD

What I expected was the usual range of vicious socialist lies about Margaret Thatcher.

What we got was an almost affectionate film about her dementia, coupled with a lot of intersting elements concerning her rise in the Tory party and her final undermining by the Grey Men.

Whatever people think about Thatcher- personally, not being a natural Tory I have never liked her, but know that she stands clear by a country mile as Britain's greatest post WW2 Prime Minister- this is a very well made film, with superior script and acting, and only the occasional irritation that it's hard to identify actors whose faces you know with politicians whose faces you also know.

A good job, very well done.

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› See all 214 customer reviews (newest first) on Amazon.co.uk

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Maggie

What an excellent performance from Meryl Streep. She was so convincing with her excellent acting. A must for Maggie fans and even if you are not its a really good film!

Published 4 days ago by Mikey

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent film!

I was never a great fan of Margaret Thatcher but was interested in seeing the film after it came out. Read more

Published 7 days ago by DataStickUser

2.0 out of 5 stars Maggie

Didn't think much of this film , did not show the true Margaret thatcher same as I thought it would be a lot better

Published 9 days ago by Gillian Shaw

5.0 out of 5 stars great drama

not my favorite person but felt great sadness at the end meryl streep was fabulosand the makeup was very well done i could believe it was really her

Published 16 days ago by pat sweeney

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Film.

Great film, Fantastic portrayal by Meryl Streep.

Beginning of the film, keeps jumping from past to present - however improves.

Would 100% recommend.

Published 21 days ago by That Manatee

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic political movie

Great acting, portraying an iconic figure. Whether you agreed with Mrs Thatcher or not, the movie is worth watching. Passion, determination and energy throughout.

Published 26 days ago by rp

5.0 out of 5 stars the iron lady

arrived very quickly, I thought watching this flim it was a bit sad knowing that Baroness Thatcher had passed away, but this was a good eye opener, of how this lady worked so hard... Read more

Published 1 month ago by D. Weaver

5.0 out of 5 stars loved the film

it was a present to soninlaw he also loved the film so a very happy couple of people thank you

Published 1 month ago by maria cook

4.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite characterisation by Merryl Streep.

This film is a masterpiece of acting and portrays the physical and mental decline of the first woman prime minister of Britain. Read more

Published 1 month ago by SEMPER AFRICANUS

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking film

This was a compelling story about a woman who provoked both antagonism and admiration. That she was the first and only woman prime minister of the United Kingdom underlines the... Read more

Published 1 month ago by B Jervis (New Zealand)

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