Meryl Streep is up to the Thatcher challenge

Meryl Streep as Thatcher in “Iron Lady”.

Meryl Streep has the versatility to play Lady Thatcher in “Iron Lady” but faces a tricky task achieving a portrayal 'just subversive enough' to win over the award judges.
You're probably already familiar with this incredible scene in “Mamma Mia”. “I was in your arms, thinking I belonged there,” she tells Pierce Brosnan, while standing on the edge of a cliff and wrestling with an orange pashmina. “I figured it made sense,” she sighs, while Brosnan stares at his feet. “Building me a fence.”
If Streep could pull off that nonsense, she can pull off anything.
And that is exactly what Streep has to do before the January release of “The Iron Lady”.
Firstly, she has to appease the many prospective British audience members who still have a great deal of admiration for Thatcher, and who are concerned this film will effectively be a coterie of smug Hollywood liberals mocking an 86-year-old pensioner.
Streep's off to a good start on this front and has made a point of saying she admires Thatcher's personality, if not her politics, in a recent round of interviews. “I still don't agree with a lot of her policies,” she said, “but I feel she believed in them and that they came from an honest conviction.... She stuck to what she believed in, and that's a hard thing to do. She's still an incredibly divisive figure, but you miss her clarity today. It was all very clear and up front, and I loved that eagerness to mix it up and to make it about ideas.”
Having established herself as a fan of the woman's indomitable spirit, she can move on to the second, even harder task: winning the hearts and minds of her colleagues.
As awards season approaches, Streep will have to persuade the film business -- not an industry known for its deathless championing of Conservative politics -- that her portrayal of Thatcher is just subversive enough to warrant a place on the Oscar and Bafta ballots. The film's trailer suggests that again, she's got this pretty much spot-on: her hen-pecking of husband Dennis (Jim Broadbent) and some comic elocution lessons in the style of “The King's Speech” look like they'll undermine Thatcher's legend without trashing her personal dignity.
Mamma Mia, indeed.

Source: Internet