Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady (2012)
Margaret Thatcher - The Iron Lady is the first major documentary to look back on the development and impact of this remarkable woman, whom commentators of both the political left and right agree changed the face of 20th Century politics forever. Featuring many excerpts from her powerful speeches and insightful contributions from her political supporters and detractors, a portrait emerges of a woman whose strength of conviction eventually becomes the weakness of intransigence.
Rating: 7.2/10 by 4 users
Alternative Title:
Country:
United Kingdom
Language:
English
Runtime: 01 hour 30 minutes
Budget: $0
Revenue: $0
Plot Keyword: biography, british prime minister, female prime minister
Told by way of retrospective interviews and actuality, this is quite an interesting chronology of the life, rise and fall of a woman who dominated the British, and to a certain extent the global, political stage during the 1980s. Sadly, like so many of these style documentaries, it is somewhat adulatory in it's delivery. We celebrate, rightly up to point, the achievements of a woman entering British politics in the 1950s and having to fight a series of battles just to get nominated for a ballot paper, let alone elected - her struggle with a sexist, nigh on misogynist environment where women were rarely, if ever, considered suitable for political life by the establishment gentlemen. The use of footage to illustrate the story is straightforward enough, but the commentaries lack punch - the visuals allow us to see what we see, and those of us who lived through her administrations will remember her as we saw her at the time, and through whatever coloured lens we chose to look at her legacy. This film, however, makes little attempt to offer any critical judgement on that legacy, and though it does illustrate just how determined/bloody-minded the woman was, it offers us precious little insight as to what made her tick, that we had not already seen many times before.
