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.)

Deer Hunter http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077416/

Kramer vs. Kramer http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079417/

Silkwood http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086312/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086312/

The Iron Lady http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1007029/

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Hereafter - Review

This movie, Hereafter, touches upon the subject of the possibility of life after death.  It primarily focuses on one near death experience of a hip young sexy female French newscaster caught up in a natural disaster.

Without being a spoiler if you have not seen this movie here is the storyline. 

Hereafter

A drama centered on three people who are haunted by mortality in different ways. George (Damon) is a blue-collar American who has a special connection to the afterlife. On the other side of the world, Marie (de France), a French journalist, has a near-death experience that shakes her reality. And when Marcus (Frankie/George McLaren), a London schoolboy, loses the person closest to him, he desperately needs answers. Each on a path in search of the truth, their lives will intersect, forever changed by what they believe might-or must-exist in the hereafter. Written by Warner Bros. Pictures

I like Matt Damon from the Bourne series.  One of his many acting masks is that of a strong silent loner type who of course happens to be handsome.

The movie is long but not boring to me.  It is laid back, subtle and not totally cohesive until the three main characters cross paths near the end of the movie.

The hip young sexy French newscaster is distracted by her recent near death experience.  She takes a sabbatical from TV to write a biography of some typically corrupt French politician.  She gets sidetracked and instead starts to research and write about the possibility of life after death.

As I said the movie is somewhat slow but not really boring.  All the threads eventually tie together.  You should be ready to spend a lazy afternoon to see this flick by yourself or with a loved one.  Two bowls of popcorn and two liters of Pepsi required perhaps.  It is not a thriller as sometimes advertised but just a cinematic slice of life of people living in Paris, London and San Francisco.

On many subtle levels one sees how hip young male dominated atheist French culture is afraid of death.  That the mention of death or an afterlife leads to some standard rebuttal of religion or such.  An independent opinion of the possibility of an afterlife even sans religion is verboten in polite French society.

The subtitles in English of the French in ten to fifteen percent of the film are small and probably designed for a large movie theatre screen.  Small but readable.  The French are so expressive in their body language to compensate.

The studio storyline puts Matt Damon as a blue collar worker.  While it is true he works in a sugar processing plant on the San Francisco waterfront, he has a past as a rather successful psychic dealing with the specialty of talking with the dead.  He has left that all behind because he considers it a curse rather than a blessing. 

He lives in a bubble world of hard work and evenings either taking adult education courses or listening to tapes of Charles Dickens’ novels.  Not much of a life.

The third character or characters are two British twins, boys, living in council housing, with social services trying to separate them from their drug addicted mum.  

Don’t want to be a spoiler here but I like the movie.  It is intellectual, which is not typical American movie fare.

Clint Eastwood directs.  His hallmark here is the subtle, focused and intellectual analysis of people in life and people looking for answers about an afterlife.

If I was a general TV movie critic I would give it a thumbs up with the improviso that only people interested in the subject of death and a hereafter would enjoy this movie perhaps better than a general audience. 

Acting, writing, cinematography, directing - a plus.