Tag: Meryl Streep

The Deer Hunter (1978)

Robert De Niro goes into a journey into the dark heart of America’s Vietnam experience in The Deer Hunter

Director: Michel Cimino

Cast: Robert De Niro (Mike Vronsky), Christopher Walken (Nick Chevotarevich), John Savage (Steven Pushkov), John Cazale (Stan), Meryl Streep (Linda), George Dzundza (John Welsh), Pierre Sagui (Julian Grinda), Shirley Stoler (Steven’s mother), Chuck Aspregren (Peter Axelrod)

The Deer Hunter is a mighty 1970s milestone of American cinema. Michael Cimino’s Vietnam story is a big poetic epic – its plot is slim but it’s all about the atmosphere, and Cimino’s understanding of the impact that the trauma of war has on different types of men. For vast stretches of the film nothing much in particular happens, followed by short, sharp bursts of gut-wrenching tension – but these have such impact because we have taken the time to see these men’s ordinary lives.

Mike Vronsky (Robert De Niro), Nick Chevotarevich (Christopher Walken) and Steve Pushkov (John Savage) are three Polish-American friends working in a Pittsburgh steel yard, who have volunteered to serve in Vietnam. Before they ship out, they celebrate Steve’s wedding, in a traditional Polish ceremony, and go for one last deer hunt in the woods together – where Mike outlines his philosophy of “one clean shot” (or “This is This”) and the near sacred experience of man communing with nature and hunting. In Vietnam, the three friends are captured by the Viet Cong and forced to take part in a chilling competition of Russian roulette. The impact of these experiences changes their lives – and not for the better – as they struggle to adjust as the war comes to an end.

Michael Cimino was seen at the time as the next great director. This reputation lasted little more than two years, when the box office disaster of his next film Heaven’s Gate (with its tales of ludicrous excess and Cimino’s overly demanding perfectionism) led to the destruction of a studio and effectively ended his career. To be honest, the roots of all this are there in The Deer Hunter. Cimino fought tooth and nail to prevent anything in the film being cut – and he lucked out that he had a few supportive producers and a picture powered by great performances and capturing something of the spirit of the age. Because just this once, more was indeed more.

In some ways The Deer Hunter is an over-indulgent mess. It’s very long, its plot is very slight, it’s very pleased with itself, the camera dawdles for ages through first the friends preparing for a wedding, the wedding itself and then a long hunting trip. This takes up a solid opening hour and 15 minutes of this long film – and progresses the plot forward very little other than establishing the characters and their relationships. But somehow, despite this, the film is magnetic during this. I’m almost not quite sure why, because nothing really happens at great length, but there is a sort of poetic majesty about these sequences that just makes them work.

It’s also a perfect entrée into our characters. After basically sitting and watching them for over an hour do little more than live their everyday lives, we really feel like we understand them. We know Mike is distant, controlled, slightly repressed but prone to moments of exhibitionist wildness that suggest primal, raging emotions beneath the surface. We also understand, with his famous “this is this” speech (“what the fuck does that mean?” his frustrated friend-cum-adversary Stan blurts out), that he is reaching for some sort of symbolic, expressionist understanding of man’s place in the world. He wants to be a poet but doesn’t have the abilities of expression to achieve that.

Similarly, we see Nick as a more carefree, open spirit, someone more in touch with expressing himself and more ready to seize life by the horns. He’s also got a gentle, conciliatory quality to him – out of all the characters, he fits most naturally into the role of confidante. Steven is a child, just trying to do his best in the world, but too naïve for the grown-up world. Most crucially we also see how they interact with each other, and how they relate to women.

Most women in the film are clearly of very little importance to the characters. Wives and girlfriends are very much on the outskirts of the macho world of the steelyard. And they are of similarly little concern to the men when they come home. Meryl Streep – excellent in an almost nothing part, really it’s amazing how slimly this role is written – plays a woman torn between feelings for Mike and Nick, but the men’s feelings for her waver between uncertainty, indifference and confused affection. Barely any other woman gets a look in, certainly not Steve’s wife who is treated with open suspicion as some sort of floozy.

All this thematic manly matiness then explodes in the later acts of the film, as the after-impact of war – and PTSD, although the word is never used – hits our characters square in the face. And there are few things that will hit you as square on as a bullet. Cimino of course faced waves of criticism about his inclusion of the grisly gambit (no evidence that it was used by the Viet Cong) – but as a metaphor for going to war, and the trauma it will do to your mind, there are few things better than a “sport” which involves placing a gun to your head and pulling the trigger.

These scenes are already tension-inducing to watch (you can’t help but put yourself in the shoes of the men putting that gun to their heads and wondering if they’ll hear a click or nothing ever again) but Cimino ramps up the pressure here, helped by truly powerhouse performances by De Niro, Walken and Savage. The unbelievable intensity of these scenes, and the total gear shift from everything you’ve seen up to this point in the movie, is a justification of Cimino’s slow pace earlier. After a luxurious opening sequence where we’ve watched the guys fool around, dance, sing and play pool, to suddenly be thrown into this grim, despairing, terrifying situation works brilliantly.

No wonder the rest of the film feels as much in shock as the characters do. Walken is exceptional (and Oscar-winning) as the sensitive soul whose spirit and will to live are destroyed by the incident, who no longer sees any point going home and barely even (by the end) seems to remember who or what he was. Cimino even makes the film feel colder, drabber and chillier in the third act back in Pittsburgh, following Mike’s return home – and his utter inability to deal with his experiences or communicate the horrors of what he has gone through to his friends.

This is also where the film gains immeasurably from a truly sublime performance from De Niro as Mike. In any other actor’s career, this performance would be the stand-out, so it says a lot for De Niro that it’s so often overlooked. But he underplays to devastating effect, as an inarticulate, slightly shy man who has a sheen of confidence, who will do what it needs to survive, who has a poetry and power of love in him that he can’t really express or understand. De Niro is truly brilliant in this film, a still centre that bears almost the total weight of Cimino’s thematic intentions. Essentially De Niro kinda plays an everyman Vietnam vet, and the burden of a whole country after the war without ever having the release of fireworks. He’s excellent.

But then the whole film is a little bit excellent. The Deer Hunter is a masterpiece of a sort, a compelling, dark, tragic and unsettling piece of poetic movie-making. Saying that, there’s something uncomfortable in its depiction of its non-American characters – to a man they are all violence loving degenerates – but then in a film that focuses on the unsettling experience of these Hicksville Americans in a land they don’t understand and can’t deal with, this is at least justifiable in a sense. The Deer Hunter’s main problem at points is that it is a rather pompous, pleased with itself film, but it’s not so much the story that is so strong here but the telling – and Cimino’s telling is first class.

The Post (2017)

Hanks and Streep bust Watergate in advance in Spielberg’s too dry The Post

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Meryl Streep (Katharine Graham), Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee), Sarah Paulson (Tony Bradlee), Bob Odenkirk (Ben Bagdikian), Tracy Letts (Fritz Beebe), Bradley Whitford (Arthur Parsons), Bruce Greenwood (Robert McNamara), Matthew Rhys (Daniel Ellsberg), Alison Brie (Lally Graham), Carrie Coon (Meg Greenfield), Jesse Plemons (Roger Clark), David Cross (Howard Simons), Michael Stuhlbarg (AM Rosenthal)

There are few things newspaper journalists like more than old-fashioned films about the glory days of the press, showing journalists to be uniformly noble, upstanding, seekers of truth. There are few things Hollywood likes more than films the feature Streep and Hanks and/or are directed by Spielberg. As such, it’s not really a surprise that The Post received laudatory reviews, or that it crept into the Best Picture list of 2017 (it only got one other nomination, inevitably for Streep).

The film covers the Washington Post’s decision in 1971 to publish details from the Pentagon Papers, originally leaked to the New York Timesby former Defence Department official Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys). The papers detail the American government’s deceptive public messages on Vietnam, a war they knew to be unwinnable for almost ten years. The Nixon administration has blocked publication in the New York Times, but when the Post gets the same papers, owner and publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) have a difficult decision to make – suppress the truth or publish and face crippling legal penalties that could destroy the business.

The Post is quite similar in some ways to Spielberg’s far more successful Lincoln – a po-faced history lesson, told with panache, but essentially a dry civics lesson which draws some neat, but a little too on point, parallels with current events. Certainly it’s clear whom we are meant to be thinking of when the camera shows a shadowy Nixon in long shot from outside the White House, ranting into a phone in the Oval office late at night (admittedly, in a nice touch, the film uses the actual audio from Nixon’s Oval Office recordings). The parallels between press freedom and the spin of politics (or the charges of Fake News flung at any story the powers that be don’t like) are pretty clear. They are also pretty obvious.

Part of the film’s problem is that, unlike All the President’s Men (where the story covers full investigative journalism and Woodward and Bernstein need to piece the story together against the odds), this film hands everything to the journalists on a plate. It doesn’t even try to put a puzzle or some form of mystery before the viewers. Instead, the history is painstakingly (and drily) explained to give us the context, then each stage of the Post getting the papers is shown in simple and rather undramatic steps. There isn’t a sense – despite Bob Odenkirk’s deputy editor doing a bit of legwork – that the Post needed to work that hard to land the story. Crikey, you can see why The Times (who really did the crack the story) were a bit pissed at the film stealing their glory.

Once the papers are in the Post’s hands, the story almost immediately jumps to one night in which the papers are read and the board and the journalists squabble over whether they can legally publish or not. After that we get a swift coda where everything turns out fine, backs are slapped and the Supreme Court says it’s all good. There just isn’t quite enough drama. In fact we feel like we are watching a footnote, rather than the real story, which seems to be happening on the margins (for starters, the scandal of government lies on Vietnam, how The New York Times broke the story, and the Watergate break-in, a recreation of which rather clumsily closes the picture).

And I get that the film is trying to tell a story about how important a free press is and, yes, it’s great – but despite having a number of characters talk at length about this, I’m not sure what the film really tells us that we don’t already know. Instead it moves methodically but swiftly through events, carefully telling us what happened but never turning it into a really compelling story. Pizzazz for its own sake is not a strength, but a little more oomph in delivery here might have helped.

Alongside this, the film also wants to make points about the struggle of a woman in a man’s world and the institutional sexism (that probably hasn’t changed that much) of many boardrooms. Meryl Streep’s Katharine Graham – having inherited the company after the suicide of her husband – is a brow-beaten woman struggling to impose herself in a room of men whom she feels inferior to. Even this plotline though feels slightly rushed – we have Graham cowering in a boardroom meeting and struggling with paperwork, next thing we know she hesitantly makes the call to publish and is facing down her chief opponent (Bradley Whitford, rolling out another of his arrogant men of privilege). It’s all a bit rushed, perfunctory and all as expected – and Streep can clearly play this sort of role standing on her head.

But then the whole film has this slight comfort job feeling about it – everyone clearly invested in the story and the importance of the film’s points, but clearly without being challenged by the content. By the end of the film we’re are awash with clichés, from newspaper print rolling through old machines, to Graham walking through a crowd of admiring women outside the Supreme Court. The interesting and well assembled cast don’t get enough to do, with many of them feeling slightly wasted, not least Sarah Paulson in a thankless role as “the wife”.

The Post wants to be a big, world-changing film that talks about our modern age. Instead it’s a very middle brow, middle of the road history lesson that flatters to deceive, entertaining enough just about, but immediately forgettable.

Plenty (1985)

Charles Dance and Meryl Streep endure marital misery in the bleak, oblique and uninvolving David Hare drama Plenty

Director: Fred Schepisi

Cast: Meryl Streep (Susan Traherne), Charles Dance (Raymond Brock), Tracey Ullman (Alice Park), John Gielgud (Sir Leonard Darwin), Sting (Mick), Ian McKellen (Sir Andrew Charleson), Sam Neill (Lazar)

David Hare’s 1970s play Plenty looked at the impact of peace on the war generation. A “state of the nation” story on the growth of prosperity in the post-war era, and the return of many to the humdrum reality of life with Britain’s importance as a world power in rapid decline, led to isolation, anger and depression. It’s a shame that much of that really doesn’t come across in this buttoned-up, murky and unclear social drama, with a hard-to-follow plot and a hard-to-like central character.

Susan Traherne (Meryl Streep) is an SOE courier in France during the Second World War, who has a one-night stand with fellow SOE operative Lazar (Sam Neill) which has a profound effect on her. After the war, she marries Foreign Office civil servant Raymond Brock (Charles Dance), but is unable to find a purpose and contentment in regular civilian life. As the years tick by, and their surroundings grow ever more plentiful, Susan becomes more and more unhappy, difficult and demanding.

The central issue with Plenty (I can’t comment on the play, having never seen it) is that Meryl Streep creates possibly one of the least likeable leading performance you are going to see. Perhaps mistaking Britishness for cut-glass chill – or perhaps it’s the character – Streep’s Susan is brittle, bitter, angry, annoying and infuriating. She complains about everything around her, she lashes out at people, she sulks and whines with no self-insight, she constantly makes life difficult for those around her (most of whom are unbelievably patient) and she is almost impossible to work out.

While the film perhaps intends her to be as sort-of PTSD sufferer, with undiagnosed personality disorders, who cannot reconcile the shallowness of her life with the excitement of war service, I’m not sure this comes across. All we really see is her deeply irritating self. We don’t get a sense of her war service – we see her breakdown early in the film in France – and her relationship with Lazar remains so ill-defined we are unclear what impact it had on her, other than part of a halcyon memory. The film’s final scene is a flashback to the end of the war: Susan watching a sunrise on a French hill dreaming of her life being full of days like this. That scene would have been helpful earlier – it’s the only time we see her optimistic or likeable in the film, and it gets lost by placing it at the end. With it in order we could have warmed to her more.

Instead she remains a shrill presence, in a hard to relate to film that never really makes clear whether we are meant to empathise with Susan, or find her as frustrating as some of the characters do. The film also fails to make this enigma part of its viewing design – I don’t feel like having the lines blurred made the film a richer experience, just one it was harder to engage in. Schepisi’s directing style is very cold and distant – from the slow camera moves, to the tight close ups on Susan at key moments, to the deliberate lack of clear time line (each scene moves on weeks, months or years from the previous one with only a few design and dialogue hints to suggest the change).

Combined with Hare’s indefinable script – crammed with elliptical conversations, unclear emotional and dramatic points, and political points delivered with a querying shrug – it makes for a film that is very hard work to engage with – and doesn’t offer much to reward the viewer if they do.

What pleasures there are come from the performers. Charles Dance is good as Susan’s long-suffering husband – far from a domineering patriarch, his only real crime seems to be that he is a bit boring. Ian McKellen makes a great cameo as a senior civil servant, coolly and calmly telling Susan the errors of her thinking. Sting is an odd choice (I suspect his presence helped the film get backing) and Tracey Ullman does tend to go too far as Susan’s bohemian but more emotionally restrained friend.

John Gielgud steals the show. He is simply superb as Brock’s boss, an old-school diplomat who is, at first, a figure of fun with his Edwardian values but whom events (in particular Suez) reveal to have firm principles. Gielgud also gets most of the film’s best lines, while his quiet air of polite dignity is both endearing and admirable. His delivery of the following line to a tedious bore of a party guest basically is the high point of the movie: “But perhaps before I go, I may nevertheless set you right on a point of fact. Ingmar Bergman is not a bloody Norwegian, he is a bloody Swede.”

But there aren’t enough pleasures like this in this overbearing, rather trying film that never really decides what point it’s trying to make. I think it’s something about wealth and discontent and the more selfish and scrambling build of the post-war generation towards Thatcherism. But I’m really not sure. And to be honest I’m not sure I care.

Suffragette (2015)

Votes for Women is the cry in this bad movie made about an important issue

Director: Sarah Gavron

Cast: Carey Mulligan (Maud Watts), Helena Bonham Carter (Edith Ellyn), Anne-Marie Duff (Violet Miller), Romola Garai (Alice Haughton), Ben Whishaw (Sonny Watts), Brendan Gleeson (Inspector Steed), Samuel West (Benedict Haughton), Meryl Streep (Emmeline Pankhurst), Adrian Schiller (David Lloyd George), Geoff Bell (Norman Taylo r), Finbar Lynch (Hugh Ellyn)

Votes for Women was a historic movement that looked to settle a gross injustice. It’s a major issue brimming with importance: and Lord doesn’t Suffragette know it. In fact, Suffragette is practically a textbook example of an important issue being turned into a bad film. Clunky, weighed down with its own bombast and stuffed to the gills with clichés, Suffragette fails to move and makes its vital political points seem leaden and dull.

Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) is a young washerwoman, who one day finds herself accidentally swept up in a suffragette protest. Before she knows it, her friend Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) has inveigled her to give testimony at a parliamentary hearing, where she meets Edith Ellynn (Helena Bonham Carter). Ellyn believes that peaceful struggle will lead nowhere and violent action is the only way to get what they want. As the violence escalates, Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) is tasked to infiltrate and bring down the suffragette movement.

It should be more interesting. But Suffragette is a sluggish “issue drama” whose every frame drips with the self-importance of people who feel they aren’t just making a film, they’re making a “statement”. This feeling infects everything, from the heavy-handed dialogue (too many scenes feel like speechifying rather than dialogue) to the obvious characterisations. Nothing in the film ever really rings true, and nothing ever really grips. On top of that sloppily written, it doesn’t really have any dramatic structure and events eventually peter out.

Mulligan’s saintly character – as a kind of suffragette every woman – goes through everything from abuse from her boss, to losing her home and children, to being force-fed in prison. It strains credulity – particularly as she’s playing some fictional archetype. The truly noble suffragettes are all working-class and put-upon, while Romola Garai’s upper-class wife quickly turns her back on the cause when things get risky. Bar Brendan Gleeson’s humane Inspector and Finbar Lynch’s decent husband (and even he performs an act of betrayal), every single man in this is a bastard – a paternalistic liar, a wife-beater, a bullying husband or an abusive boss. It’s just too bloody much. The film seems not to trust its audience to understand the story unless it’s acted out by a series of caricatures, as if we can’t appreciate that gender equality is a good thing in itself without a saintly sad-faced girl being mistreated by a series of misogynist ogres.

Mulligan is rather good but her angry denunciations and points during her scenes with Gleeson just sound like she’s mouthing research from the writer. The end result is, despite all the things Maud goes through, you just don’t really care about her. She feels like an empty character. Even the end of the film doesn’t revolve around her: Emily Davison is reintroduced just in time for the conclusion at the Derby. Why not just make a film about Davison? Why did they feel the need to place this uninteresting fictional character at the heart of it? Did they just feel it had to be a working class hero?

Because the script tries to cover every single element of the suffragette movement, it often feels like a box-ticking exercise. Meryl Streep gets the best tick, popping up to deliver a single speech as Emmaline Pankhurst before disappearing. But the collection of events thrown together don’t convince. Helena Bonham Carter does her very best to make Edith’s radicalism seem compelling and thought-through, but even that seems like a tack-on rather than something that really teaches us about any of the characters. Moral questions around violence and protest are almost completely ignored, and the film doesn’t really distinguish between those (essentially) willing to kill and those who wanted to protest within the law.

On top of its mediocre writing, the film is also only competently directed – its pace is often way off and sluggish, and most of the scenes are shot with an unimaginative televisual eye, mixed with standard “throw you into the action” shots for major protests. It all contributes to the entire venture not coming to life at all. For such a huge issue, and for all the importance it’s being treated with here, it just seems lifeless and rather dull.

This is despite the decent acting (Anne-Marie Duff is excellent, as are most of the rest of the principals) and the efforts of all involved. But it’s just not engaging. The most moving and gasp-inducing moment is the end credits roll of dates where countries gave women the vote (1970 for Switzerland!) – but when the most moving thing you see in the film could have cut and pasted from a Wikipedia page you are in trouble.

But what can you say about a drama about women’s rights where the male Inspector comes out as the most interesting and nuanced character? That just doesn’t feel right. And that’s the problem with Suffragette. Nothing feels right. Everything feels off. The history doesn’t ring true, the characterisations feel forced, the events seem predictable and clichéd. There’s nothing to really get you impassioned here – other than with frustration about a bad movie fudging an important subject.

The Iron Lady (2011)

Meryl Streep impersonates the Iron Lady to excellent effect in this otherwise bland and forgettable, compromised mess of a picture

Director: Phyllida Lloyd

Cast: Meryl Streep (Margaret Thatcher), Jim Broadbent (Denis Thatcher), Olivia Colman (Carol Thatcher), Roger Allam (Gordon Reece), Nicholas Farrell (Airey Neave), Iain Glen (Alfred Roberts), Richard E. Grant (Michael Heseltine), Anthony Head (Sir Geoffrey Howe), Harry Lloyd (Young Denis Thatcher), Michael Pennington (Michael Foot), Alexandra Roach (Young Margaret Thatcher), John Sessions (Edward Heath)

In British politics has there been a figure as controversial as Margaret Thatcher? A domineering Prime Minister who reshaped the country (for better or worse depending on who you speak to), crafting a legacy in the UK’s politics, economy and society that we will continue to feel for the foreseeable future, she’s possibly one of the most important figures in our history. It’s a life rich for a proper biographical treatment; instead, it gets this film.

The film’s framing device is focused on the ageing Thatcher (Meryl Streep), now dealing with onset dementia and having detailed conversations with her deceased husband Denis (Jim Broadbent). Cared for by her daughter Carol (Olivia Colman), she reflects on her political career and the sacrifices she made personally to achieve these. Woven in and out of this are Thatcher’s increasingly disjointed memories of her political career.

The most surprising thing about this film is how little it actually wants to engage with Thatcherism itself. Perhaps aware that (certainly in the UK) Thatcher remains an incredibly divisive figure, the film’s focus is actually her own struggles with grief and approaching dementia. Her career as PM is relegated to a series of flashbacks and short scenes, which fill probably little more than 20-30 minutes of the runtime, shot and spliced together as a mixture of deliberately subjective memories and fevered half-dreams. Can you imagine a film about Thatcher where Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike doesn’t merit a mention? You don’t need to: thanks to The Iron Lady it now exists.

Perhaps Thatcher’s politics were considered to “unlikeable” – certainly, one imagines, by its writer and director – to be something to craft a film around, so it was thought better to brush them gently under the table. Instead the focus is to make Thatcher as sympathetic as possible to a viewer who didn’t share her politics, by concentrating on her struggles against sexism in the 1950s and her struggles with age late on. Why not accept what Thatcher stood for and make a film (for better or worse) about that? Perhaps more material on her actual achievements in office were shot and cut (the film does have a very short run time and underuses its ace supporting cast), but the whole film feels fatally compromised – which is more than a little ironic since it is about a woman famous for her lack of compromise.

In fact it’s rather hard to escape the view that Roger Ebert put forward: “few people were neutral in their feelings about [Thatcher], except the makers of this picture”. It’s a film with no real interest in either politics or history, the two things that defined Thatcher’s entire life. And as if to flag up the mediocre nature of the material they’ve chosen, it’s then interspersed with too-brief cuts to more interesting episodes from Thatcher’s life than those we are watching. Only when the older Thatcher hosts a dinner party and launches into a blistering sudden condemnation of Al-Qaeda and support of military action against terrorism (followed by her casual disregard of a hero-worshipping acolyte) do we ever get a sense of finding out something about her, or of seeing her personality brought to life.

The film’s saving grace is of course Meryl Streep’s terrific impersonation of Thatcher. I call it impersonation as the film so strenuously avoids delving into the events and opinions that shaped Thatcher that Streep gets very little opportunity to really develop a character we can understand, or to present an insight into her. Her performance as the older Thatcher – losing control of her mannerisms, deteriorating over the course of the film – is impressive in its technical accomplishment, but that’s largely what it remains. As the film doesn’t allow us to really know Thatcher, and doesn’t work with what defines her, it largely fails to move us when we see her weak and alone. So for all the accomplishment of Streep’s work, I couldn’t say this was a truly great performance – certainly of no comparison to, say, Day-Lewis as Lincoln or Robert Hardy as Churchill. I’d even say Andrea Riseborough’s performance in TV’s The Long Walk to Finchley told us more about the sort of person Thatcher was than Streep does here.

Despite most of the rest of the cast being under-used though, there are some good performances. Jim Broadbent is very good as Denis Thatcher, although again his performance is partly a ghostly collection of mannerisms and excellent complementary acting. However the chemistry between he and Streep is magnificent and accounts for many of the film’s finest moments. Olivia Colman does sterling work under a bizarre fake nose as a no-nonsense Carol Thatcher. From the all-star cast of British actors, Roger Allam stands out as image-consultant Gordon Reece and Nicholas Farrell is superbly calm, cool and authoritative as Airey Neave. Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd are excellent impersonating younger Thatchers.

The Iron Lady could have been a marvellous, in-depth study of the politics of the 1980s, and a brilliant deconstruction and discussion of an era that still shapes our views of Britain today. However, it wavers instead into turning a woman defined by her public role and views into a domestic character, and brings no insight to the telling of it. By running scared of Thatcher’s politics altogether, it creates a film which makes it hard to tell why we should be making a fuss about her at all – making it neither interesting to those who know who Thatcher is, nor likely to spark interest in those who have never heard of her.

The Hours (2002)

Nicole Kidman’s Oscar winning role produced a gallery of nose based puns, everyone convinced they could sniff out comedy gold

Director: Stephen Daldry
Cast: Nicole Kidman (Virginia Woolf), Julianne Moore (Laura Brown), Meryl Streep (Clarrisa Vaughan), Stephen Dillane (Leonard Woolf), Ed Harris (Richie Brown), Allison Janney (Sally Lester), Claire Danes (Julia Vaughan), Jeff Daniels (Louis Waters), John C Reilly (Dan Brown), Toni Collette (Kitty), Miranda Richardson (Vanessa Bell)

I remember when this film was released that it was garlanded with much praise as an intelligent and compassionate piece of filmmaking and a literate masterpiece. Well I’ve never seen it before and I have to say it holds up pretty well, even though it’s much more of a solid, impressive piece of professional film making than anything you might call a masterpiece.

The film covers three time periods each looking at one day in the life of three different women. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, the day we see encapsulates in microcosm the life of each women. So we have Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf struggling to deal with depression while working on Mrs.Dalloway; Julianne Moore as a depressed 1950s housewife trapped in a suburban marriage; finally Meryl Streep as an editor in the 200s who has dedicated her life to looking after a poet friend who is dying of AIDS.

Each of these three plot lines are carefully intercut with both sharp scriptwriting and patient direction (Hare and Daldry’s stage experience here is a real boon for a concept that is actually quite theatrical). Although the opening sequence of the film suggests we might be in for a dizzying series of intercuts (the time period in this sequence switches almost every shot) it soon settles down into some well structured conversation scenes, moving almost in a cycle from our plot lines to another and only rarely directly cutting mid scene from time line to time line.

Of the plot lines I found Meryl Streep’s more modern day plot the most engaging and that Streep’s performance as the patient martyr carried the heart of the film. This was despite Ed Harris’ overblown performance as the dying poet, one of those two scene cameos that draw far more praise than they deserve. But this story has a tragic simplicity and Streep brings a lifetime of vicarious hopes and dreams out from every beat of the day.

Nicole Kidman however won the notice and awards as Woolf. Well deserved as these notices were, this is a more traditional part with clearer “award worthy” acting moments. While these are excellently done (Stephen Dillane is terrific as Leonard Woolf), the Woolf parts don’t quite link with the two other plot lines and, for me, didn’t carry the same emotional force that the tragedy of normal lifes did in the later plot lines.

Julianne Moore also does great work as a depressed housewife who lacks the emotional articulacy to fully understand her feelings, though the decision to introduce a direct link between the 1950s and 1990s plot lines later in the film does mean that the Woolf plot line feels even more like a slightly disconnected story. But this section of the film crackles with claustrophobia and Moore demonstrates the confused sexuality below the surface of Americana.I feel like I’ve been hard on this film, which is a very professional piece of work with some great performances and some real emotional high points. There are some great cameos from classy actors like Toni Collette, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, John C Reilly, Claire Danes and Allison Janney. It also is a very sensitive exploration of the pressure sexuality and emotions can press on people – even in the 1990s where homosexuality isn’t a dirty secret, Streep’s character still has more than enough confused emotional hang ups to sort out.

It’s a very good film but it’s so professionally done and smoothly assembled, the acting so sharp and on the money, that I’m not sure if there is as much heart behind the scenes in its making than appears on screen.