Movie reviews
The audience is given to understand that this is a poignant moment, that Thatcher, the daughter of a shopkeeper, who brutalised British society during her reign as prime minister, is suffering the personal consequences of having created a society that is not classless, as she once averred, but which lacks any touch of class. Generating sympathy for Margaret Thatcher is a thankless task bordering on Sisyphean, but Streep’s portrayal is superb, particularly when a confused Thatcher imagines that her late husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent), is still with her, even as she prepares, with the help of her daughter Carol (Olivia Colman), to donate his clothes to charity. Once the story broadens out to explore Thatcher’s youth and the years of her political dominance of the Conservative Party, Lloyd’s film loses focus. Too many crucial events are packed into too short a time, as issues as important as the miners’ strikes, the Brighton bombing and the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, the relentless privatisation of state assets and the Falklands War are acknowledged but rarely explored. Thatcher’s formative years, in which her neo-conservative policies were first nurtured, are limited to a couple of scenes in which she watches her father take to a soapbox to declare his faith in economic self-sufficiency. That fragmentary approach might be faithful to the notion that the aging Thatcher is not compos mentis as she drifts in and out of reality, but it does mean that, Streep’s fine performance notwithstanding, the film lacks rigorous evaluation.
Joyce Vincent died in a London flat in 2003, but her remains weren’t discovered until 2006. Dreams of a Life (PG) is a documentary by writer-director Carol Morley, who investigates how it is possible for a person to so completely slip through the cracks in society. Zawe Ashton plays Joyce in dramatic reconstructions of the young woman’s life. These are juxtaposed with talking-heads contributions by former friends and lovers of Joyce (her family declined to be interviewed for the film). The result is a fascinating, frustrating tale that defies preconceived notions. Rather than being a typical aging, eccentric recluse, Joyce Vincent was a beautiful, vibrant and popular young woman, liked and respected. Morley’s film offers no pat answers to the question of why Joyce’s death went undetected, and her unsentimental approach means that Joyce’s failings and foibles are integral to the tale, while also keeping to a minimum the inevitable hand-wringing over social atomisation and the breakdown of basic interactions. Morley does wander into the realms of unsubstantiated conjecture, particularly in terms of Joyce’s relationship with her father, but this is a bracingly forthright account of one woman’s death and what it tells us about how we live.
