Did you see Mamma Mia a few years ago? To summarise for those who haven’t, the entire film is pretty much played as a drunken hen weekend on an orgiastic island paradise in a part of the Mediterranean more permissive of appallingly tuneless karaoke than any civilized nation on Earth. Anyone who claimed that this film was good in the standard sense is clearly stark raving mad, or worse. On the one hand there’s the sainted Meryl Streep interpreting the greatest hits of Swedish disco darlings Abba, a catalogue of songs which were they any cheesier would actually physically turn into a block of Gotland Blue, as if she were playing Hedda Gabler. On the other hand we have Pierce Brosnan ill-advisedly warbling an excruciating rendition of “SOS,” which as a result became perhaps the most aptly titled song in the history of music. The film also allowed a horrified audience to savour the delights of the fine Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard being chased across a rafter by a horny Julie Walters, Christine Baranski gyrating manically atop a petrified young man to “Does Your Mother Know,” and a homosexual Colin Firth being tied to a post and felt up left, right and centre by a vicious mob of dance students last seen waddling along a promontory clad in suffocating speedos to “Lay All Your Love On Me”. Having subjected the unsuspecting crowd to all of the above, the film’s near-geriatric cast of acclaimed veteran actors murder yet another medley of songs which were crap in the first place, only this time dressed in full spandex, flairs and platforms. I can only assume that this was done just in case the audience had forgotten to also gouge out their eyes when they rammed hot pokers through both ears to make the pain go away.
Watching Mamma Mia, let us be absolutely clear, was the most embarrassing experience of my young life. It is also, with the exception of 3D Smurf-porn favourite Avatar, the highest grossing film in British cinema history.
If you’re wondering how this atrocity came to pass, allow me to shed light into the abyss. When I said the film wasn’t good in the standard sense, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t think it was a good film. On the contrary, Mamma Mia is a trash masterpiece. It’s good precisely because it is so inhumanly bad, but the real accomplishment therein that unlike The Room and Troll 2 this film knows how bad it is and proceeds to embrace its own rubbishness and have a damn good laugh about it. Meryl Streep is supposed to take “The Winner Takes It All” as seriously as when Cleopatra puts an asp to her breast in mourning for Mark Antony, and Pierce Brosnan singing is supposed to sound like an elephant being violated with a piano, because it’s all done in the spirit of irony.
It is surprising, then, that having created one of the great ironic films of the past few years, rejecting the glitzy seriousness of most movie musicals in favour of the tacky cliché-ridden corniness that is actually symptomatic of most stage musicals, irony is completely absent from The Iron Lady, also directed by Phyllida Lloyd and again starring Meryl Streep.
If the transition from frothy camp to a serious work about the life of probably the most controversial British politician of the last century seems like a recipe for disaster, then guess what: you’re absolutely right. The Iron Lady is a woefully stupid film precisely because it lacks the irony that prevented Mamma Mia from being stupid, or the irony that purposefully made it a sublimely stupid tribute to binge-drinking depending on how you view it. If The Iron Lady seems to aspire to worthiness it is because the film is unabashedly the Meryl Streep show, and we know from experience that this is at its best one of the greatest shows on earth. It is so entirely the Meryl Streep show that key members of the Thatcher cabinet appear only in the form of actors sporting the appropriate hairpiece, and even her husband Denis doesn’t get much of a look in: in fact for most of the film he’s already dead. Lloyd knows that Streep’s performance is the only thing going for the film, and as such throws everything else to the lions. This is probably for the best, as Streep delivers a typically bravura piece of acting, attaining utterly convincing verisimilitude alongside genuine dramatic depth, intensity and subtlety. She last won an Oscar nearly thirty years ago, and in the intervening years it has gotten to the stage where if she isn’t nominated the world will probably crumble in on itself leaving a small black hole singing “Dancing Queen” with its last gasps. If she wins next month it will be a deserved victory for a great performance, but don’t for one second think that this will excuse a highly problematic film.There seems to be an inherent Feminist agenda to this film: it’s directed by a woman, written by a woman, starring a fiercely intelligent and cultured actress, and it’s about a woman who was the most powerful person in the country during the 1980s. Scenes of Thatcher bullying her all-male cabinet are played with gusto and not a little amount of admiration for her vicious admonishments. The flashback of her ousting by the same weak men is met by the decrepit present-day dementia sufferer with an angry tirade against the male sex, and a curiously jarring fear that she neglected her traditional maternal responsibilities: her relationship with daughter Carol is uneasy, and her husband’s ghost departs with the words “You’ll be fine on your own, you always were.” The heavy use of flashbacks conjures sympathy for the universal sense of degeneration that comes with old age, as they stem from a vision of a senile old lady who comes across not unlike Lear on the heath. Madness derives from helplessness when once the individual was all-powerful.
The filmmakers clearly used the political happenings of the Thatcher era to relate a personal tale of feminine struggle and the hardships of losing one’s power, both political and personal. Yet the film is foolish not to recognise the irony of portraying a woman proud of her working-class origins, which further set her apart from her peers, who as a leader crippled working class industries. Nor does it see the irony of creating a reverential silence around her pivotal Francis of Assisi line “Where there is discord, we will bring harmony,” when however you feel about her politics surely the one thing she failed to do was achieve this very harmony from discord. The result is a film that is worthy of no more serious analysis than that afforded to Mamma Mia.
Adam Hollingworth
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