So why then is this movie, with its rich subject, broad canvas and magnificent lead performance, with all that high-serious, high-toned, high-quality stuff going for it, still, at times, somewhat dull and unsatisfying? A “must see” for Streep’s performance, and an enjoyably literate bio-movie in the vein of The King‘s Speech and The Queen, it’s a movie that, in the end, doesn’t really move you (or move me, anyway) even though Thatcher herself was a political leader who moved people intensely all the time — to rage or adoration and to many calibrations in between.

Perhaps that’s a occupational hazard of some bio movies about controversial political figures. I’m not sure of their political leanings, but The Iron Lady’s director and writer — Phyllida Lloyd of Mamma Mia! (the world wide hit in which Streep sang ABBA songs and danced with Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan), and Abi Morgan, who co-wrote Irish filmmaker Steve McQueen‘s sexually uninhibited nightmare Shame — would seem likely lefties or at least moderates. (Most writers and directors, and artists in general, are.) At the very least, you’d expect that they’d question many or some of the policies Maggie stood for: untrammeled free market economics, deregulation of business, anti-labor union, pro-Reagan, hard core conservatism, or, as it came to be known in England, “Thatcherism.”

It’s also probable they admire Thatcher as a woman who broke political barriers and won a game that was initially stacked against her. As do I.

But, whatever their own politics, the strategy of Lloyd and Morgan here is to pretty much ignore or down-pedal Thatcher’s hard-core views and what influenced by them, or to sideswipe them, except in brief spurts (a flurry of Irish Republican Army violence that includes bombing and the assassination of Airey Neale, played by Nicholas Farrell and her reconquest of the Falklands after Argentina retook them) — and to concentrate instead on her internal battles with stuffy conservative politicos like Michael Heseltine (Richard E. Grant) and Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head), and a home life that includes her ghostly confabs with Denis, and her sparky confrontations with daughter Carol (Olivia Coleman).

The movie doesn’t really dramatize Thatcher’s politics, or what their consequences were, or why she had them (her family had been Liberal, after all), or what she tried to achieve, except for brief symbolic pictures and jabs: like the surly protesters who keep charging her limousine and shouting in at her window, or the transcendent pre-Dancing-with-the-Stars tableau moment when she twirls (after a fashion) across a ballroom floor with Ronald Reagan.

Indeed the movie seems to spend as much time with Streep’s Thatcher in her alleged semi-dotage, summoning up visions of the past while she wanders around her dwelling, as it does with Thatcher in her Iron Lady prime. I’m not sure of the intention here — maybe it’s to elicit maximum sympathy for a figure whom the moviemakers know is divisive, maybe it’s something more Dickensian — but I would have preferred more moments of high historical drama amd less of lower imagined pathos.

Luckily, the movie has Streep, still in her prime at 62, still effortlessly slipping beneath the skins of her parts, still showing us what acting is really, really all about, still turning herself wonderfully into somebody else for our edification and pleasure. My favorite performance by a movie actress this year was by the wondrous Korean player Jeong-Hie Yon as the beleaguered grandmother in Poetry and I was also partial to Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, and Viola Davis in The Help. But I was unhappy that the Weinsteins squeezed out another Best Actress win for Meryl Streep — and I would have voted for her too. Now, there’s a woman — you think as you watch her in The Iron Lady — who could really run a country. Or at least, there’s a woman who can really run a movie about a woman running a country.

Featurettes: “Making of” Documentary: Featurettes on the young Margaret Thatcher.

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