Arts: Iron Deficiency

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Movies Iron Deficiency Not even Meryl Streep can rescue this dreadful biopic. By Dana Stevens Posted Thursday, Dec 29, 2011, at 11:46 PM ET Reviewing Steve McQueen's sex-addiction drama Shame, I remarked that that movie's lead, Michael Fassbender, deserved the year's award for outstanding performance in a mediocre movie. After seeing Meryl Streep play Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, I'm wondering if the category might not need to be divided by gender: Streep would take Best Actress in a Bad Movie in a walk. This hokey, scattered biopic, directed by the actor Phyllida Lloyd (who also directed Streep in the ABBA jukebox musical Mamma Mia!), was scripted by Abi Morgan, who also, as it happens, co-wrote Shame. In a strange way, Shame and The Iron Lady have a lot in common: Both feature a driven, single-minded protagonist who manages to impress us as complex and larger-than-life thanks to the sheer force of personality of the actor playing him or her. And both films seem to take place in a context so thin, it's as if their bullheaded main characters—Shame's self-loathing poon hound and The Iron Lady's indestructible battle-ax—were acting against a painted backdrop. At least in Shame's case that insubstantial backdrop was elegantly rendered. The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles. There are a lot of cinematic problems presented by the form of the biopic: How exact an impression of the famous subject do you want to coax from your lead actor? How do you structure the story temporally: chronologically or using flashbacks of some kind? How best to ease ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Can You Really Make a Bomb Out of a Cupcake? Yglesias: Maybe Average People Should Avoid the Stock Market Entirely Is the Guy From Bon Iver the Worst Poet in the History of Pop Music?	Advertisement
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