Monday, April 16, 2012

No Apologies to Meryl Streep - The Iron Lady is a Shite Movie



I admit to having this love hate thing with Meryl Streep over the years.  I never paid much attention to her career even though the NYT film critics were constantly reporting her latest triumph over the years.  I have no sexual attraction, fantasy/sexual tension (?), towards the actress or the personalities she has portrayed over the years.
  
It took me literally thirty years to see Deer Hunter which was her first stellar part.  I think I formed a wrong opinion of her perhaps after seeing Kramer vs. Kramer in a theater with a girlfriend.  I perhaps equated her performance with the real life relationship that was shaky and ended after that movie quite literally.

I perhaps also had mistaken Ms. Streep for one of these chameleon actors like Keanu Reeves whose film performances seems to only reflect those he acts with rather than the performance itself.  I perhaps mistook Meryl’s performance as a chameleon thing along side Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Kramer vs. Kramer. 

In every movie he does, Dustin Hoffman plays Dustin Hoffman to this day. There is that annoying point in every Hoffman performance where he does that nasal thing in his voice, a metaphor for his maximum method “acting” effort thing and the rest of the performance returns to simply low point Dustin fare (mumbling). (There can only be one Brando Dustin.)

I did not see Sophie’s Choice when it came out.  It seemed a chick flick and there is a saturation point in any life regarding seeing another Holocaust related story.

My real and eternal admiration came in the movie Silkwood.  Saw it with some friends, had not heard of the movie ten minutes before I went in to see it.  Then on the way out, I saw a movie poster and saw that the admirable performance of the actress in that movie had been Meryl Streep.  My jaw dropped.  I saw a movie, liked the performance, and did not know who the actress was; perhaps I was a bit tipsy.  I then and there conceded that Meryl Streep was a very good actress but remained no great fan.

In her later years, I have seen wonderful performances of Streep in movies on TV and not in the movie houses. I will not go on about which flicks I liked of hers over the years or why.

I did last night pay to see her performance on Cable TV in her latest Oscar winning performance in the Iron Lady.  She deserved the Oscar for it as a seasoned character actress of the first class kind in the old Hollywood definitions of such.

I must say however that the script and the storyline of The Iron Lady is Shit.

I was expecting a sympathetic performance of the cold calculating ambitious British politician of Margaret Thatcher. I was sadly disappointed.
 
This is the sort of movie you do after a famous person is dead to invoke sympathy.  No doubt the movie financed with Brit cash is an attempt to make Margaret Thatcher palatable after all these years among the population. Propaganda flick Meryl?  And an attempt to quell the numbers, millions of Brits, who will literally be dancing in the streets on the day of her actual death?

Good performance.  Bad script.  Worthless subject matter.

I will say in retrospective that perhaps Dementia in Lady Thatcher’s case or Alzheimer’s in Ronald Reagan’s case is perhaps caused by people who never practiced thinking in their lifetime.  Never formed an original thought in their lives. Not a nice thing to say.

Don’t pay money to see this movie and you won’t need any Kleenex if you do. (Dry. Very dry. Two drops of vermouth worth.)





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