Meryl Streep

Streep is so powerful as Margaret Thatcher in director Phyllida Lloyd’s “The Iron Lady” that she made me believe I understood the legendary and ferocious former British prime minister much better than I had before. That may be an illusion, of course; Streep does not know Thatcher personally, and neither do you or I. But it’s really all you can ask from an actor playing a historical personage, especially one whose significance is so immense and whose legacy is so disputed. This Maggie Thatcher — played by Streep as the mature politician and by Alexandra Roach as the young Maggie Roberts, a grocer’s daughter from Lincolnshire — is in many ways a sympathetic and admirable character, a woman of indomitable will, enormous ambition and profound personal convictions. Those qualities are also shown as driving her to sociopathic extremes, and to a megalomaniacal conception of herself as embodying all the noblest British qualities and single-handedly saving the British nation from socialist doom.

I find that a highly plausible interpretation of Thatcher as an individual, who had to overcome both the inherent sexism of British politics and society and also the ingrained snobbishness of her beloved Conservative Party. (Tory politicians customarily came from the landed gentry and the titans of industry, not the lower-middle shopkeeping bourgeoisie.) She could be as dismissive of any womanly talk about emotions and feelings as she was with pinko abstractions like “society” (although her assertion that there is no such thing does not appear in Abi Morgan’s screenplay). The film’s present tense is around 2009, when the widowed Baroness Thatcher, in her mid-80s, is struggling with senile dementia but has lost none of her flinty intelligence. When some faintly patronizing younger woman comes down to Thatcher’s level, schoolteacher-style, and thanks her for creating opportunities for other women, Maggie does not appear interested in the gender-studies claptrap. “It used to be about trying to do something,” she says disdainfully.

If I enjoyed “The Iron Lady” more than Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar,” that’s not to say it’s necessarily a better film. It’s largely about how much more charismatic and enjoyable Streep is than the woefully miscast Leonardo DiCaprio. Both pictures adhere closely to standard biopic formula, turning contentious historical figures into the subjects of routine domestic melodrama while playing a highlight reel of major 20th-century events in the background: strikes, riots, bombings, hunger strikes, the Berlin Wall. It’s massively ironic that Streep’s Thatcher tells another interlocutor that no one seems to care about ideas anymore, since “The Iron Lady” is entirely bereft of them.

Oh, we get that young Maggie Roberts inherited her belief in individual effort and limited government from her upstanding dad — who was a local politician for the centrist Liberal Party, in its waning years — but no mention is made, for instance, of her encounter with Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” as a 20-year-old Oxford student, which marked her conversion to what was then the Tory far right. No politician, including Ronald Reagan, has ever gone further than Thatcher did in trying to implement Hayek’s free-market ideology (and that of his principal disciple, Milton Friedman) on a grand scale. I can understand why Lloyd and Morgan concluded that fundamental questions of economic theory didn’t belong in a movie for general audiences, but I’d like to believe that if Lady Thatcher is sufficiently compos mentis to watch it, she will snort in derision at its sentimental narrative mode: There she is as a girl, dewy-eyed and dish-scrubbing, as her pa extols the British spirit; there she is as elected leader of the United Kingdom, telling the miners’ unions to stuff it: “The medicine is painful, but the patient requires it!”

One of the oddities of Morgan’s screenplay lies in the fact that Thatcher is a living person who still owns the right to her own public utterances, so that everything we see in the movie is a paraphrase rather than a direct quote. But that’s not nearly as strange as the fact that so much of “The Iron Lady” consists of the present-day Thatcher’s extended conversations with her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent), who died in 2003. It’s not unusual for elderly people to believe, or half-believe, that deceased spouses are still with them, of course, and such may be the case with Thatcher. But Broadbent’s semi-belligerent, semi-affectionate Denis is too obviously a writer’s gimmick, a key to unlock Thatcher’s memories and a symbol of the way she conflates past and present.

“The Iron Lady” begins with a delicious scene of the aged Thatcher buying milk at a corner grocery, a completely unnoticed old lady surrounded by the new world she made (fast-talking, suit-wearing jerks attached to their cellphones) and the new world she could not resist (a London street awash in bhangra music and South Asian comestibles). Most of what follows is straightforward, brightly photographed TV drama in the BBC style, both mildly entertaining and somewhat interesting to those who remember that era. There’s John Sessions as the early-’70s prime minister Edward Heath, whose compromises with the left persuaded Thatcher to skew ever more sharply in the other direction; and Nicholas Farrell as Thatcher’s mentor Airey Neave, whose assassination by the IRA hardened her on the Irish question. Anthony Head plays the shuffling, stammering Geoffrey Howe, and Richard E. Grant plays the suave Michael Heseltine, two influential Tories who would eventually betray Thatcher, ending her political career. If you’re really a Brit-politics wonk, you’ll be glad to see Michael Pennington as the beloved Labour leader Michael Foot, who would lead the left-wing opposition to its 1983 Armageddon.

I suppose what you’ll get from “The Iron Lady” is the sense that Thatcher was a female pioneer who relished a fight, made tough decisions she thought would return Britain to prosperity, and was hated by many people. (We repeatedly see a lazy synecdoche: Thatcher’s limo pushing through a crowd, with some angry working-class yob with bad hair pounding on her window.) That’s fine as far as it goes, but listen: Speaking as someone who despises almost every aspect of the Thatcherite social-economic consensus that has defined the capitalist world for 30 years, and almost every aspect of Thatcher’s actual policies, she deserves more than this. Streep has captured Thatcher wonderfully as a plausible human being, but “The Iron Lady” explains nothing about her thoroughgoing rejection of Britain’s postwar social-democratic consensus, or about the way she helped create a new class of the Anglo-American super-rich, or about her immense influence on the Cold War as a pragmatic intellectual influence on the Reagan administration. (She saw, much earlier than the Americans did, that Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendancy meant the end of old-line communism.)

Maggie Thatcher contains multitudes; she is rife with contradictions you can barely glimpse in this modestly affecting movie. American conservatives who profess to worship her probably don’t know that she was pro-choice and pro-gay rights (although she was against the liberalization of divorce). She was one of the least popular prime ministers in British history yet was elected three times, partly thanks to the hopeless divisions within the Labour Party and partly because British elections are, at least arguably, less dominated by questions of personality. (As Lloyd and Morgan make clear, if she hadn’t fought and won the Falklands war in 1982, Thatcher’s premiership might easily have ended after three or four years.) As a starting point for Meryl Streep’s 17th Oscar nomination — and perhaps her third win — “The Iron Lady” is exemplary. As a starter course in Thatcher studies and a post-”King’s Speech,” Brit-history melodrama, it’s only barely acceptable.

“The Iron Lady” opens Dec. 30 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to begin Jan. 13.

So along with the predictable passel of nominations (nine apiece) for James Cameron’s “Avatar” and ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” — and I’m calling the divorce settlement here and now: Jim gets best picture; Kath gets best director — the Academy spread the love in all directions. Disney/Pixar’s “Up” was nominated for both best picture and animated feature. The family-football-Sandra Bullock vehicle “The Blind Side,” which has made a ton of money while leaving bicoastal critics in glycemic shock, also got multiple nominations. Lee Daniels’ “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” got a best-picture nod along with two major acting nominations. The exquisite British female-coming-of-age film “An Education” was nominated for best picture, in a mild surprise, alongside a fully expected best-actress nomination for its irresistible ingénue star, Carey Mulligan.

In garnering best-picture and best-director nominations for his unspellable and borderline-unwatchable World War II pastiche, Quentin Tarantino becomes this year’s winner of the Martin Scorsese Way Too Late award, handed out annually to a director whose more worthwhile work has been largely ignored by the Academy. (Q.T. shared a screenwriting Oscar for “Pulp Fiction” in ’95.) In other news, it’s mighty peculiar that hardcore New Yorkers like Joel and Ethan Coen have become beloved figures in Hollywood, but there can no longer be any doubt. Their brilliant black-comic fable “A Serious Man” — a movie that gleefully and maliciously embraces the old cliché about being “too Jewish” for mainstream America — got a well-deserved nomination. But that surely wasn’t the big surprise among the gang of 10.

In a dinner conversation with critics last week at Sundance, we all agreed that one film among the best-picture nominees would be something nobody had expected. I remember a few possibilities mentioned: Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “Broken Embraces,” Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” But of course once we’d mentioned them, they weren’t unexpected anymore, were they? Nobody brought up “District 9,” the sci-fi action-allegory made by South African expat Neill Blomkamp under Peter Jackson’s production aegis, which became a surprise late-summer hit. (Dept. of complicated Hollywood dis: The movie made by Jackson’s little-known protégé gets an Academy nod, while Jackson’s own prestige production, “The Lovely Bones,” pointedly does not.)

This year’s acting nominations ran remarkably true to form, leaving all the favorites in place: George Clooney and Meryl Streep in the leading roles; Stanley Tucci and Christoph Waltz fighting it out for the evil-guy supporting actor prize, and Mo’Nique all by herself, vacuuming some shelf space in the den for that statuette. Yes, I can hear the grumbling from the cinephile margins: Clooney was better in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” than he was in “Up in the Air”; Penélope Cruz was way, way better in “Broken Embraces” than she was in the musical megaflop “Nine”; the year’s best female performance, given by Tilda Swinton in French director Érick Zonca’s “Julia,” was never even on the Academy’s radar. Sure, yes, I agree on all counts. But when Zonca’s movies start showing up on the Oscar telecast, winning Oscars, it won’t be on NBC or ABC or A&E or any other TV network; it’ll be Web-streamed live from the back room of a Hollywood Boulevard liquor store in the middle of the night. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! That’ll be cool in kind of a different way.

I’ll consider the more niche-oriented nominations in due course, but my initial reaction is that the Academy has now avoided total disgrace in the foreign-language and documentary categories for two years running, which is an all-time record. “The Cove” and “Food, Inc.” were obvious documentary nominees, but it’s a wonderful surprise to see Anders Østergaard’s “Burma VJ” on the list. A thrilling and inspiring film largely shot by anonymous contributors inside Myanmar, it documents the doomed popular uprising against the Burmese military junta in 2007 — truly a one-of-a-kind viewing experience. It’s true that French New Wave foremother Agnès Varda’s delightful, autobiographical “The Beaches of Agnès” was left out, but you can’t call that a shocker.

Instead of the customary blend of cynical and/or sentimental foreign-language glop, this year’s Academy list includes at least two films, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” and Jacques Audiard’s still-unreleased “A Prophet,” that are clearly among 2009′s finest examples of world cinema. (I still haven’t seen the Israeli-Palestinian collaborative project “Ajami,” but I hear it’s terrific too.) Any lingering controversies in this category, such as the absence of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s explosive “Il Divo” or Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother,” predate Tuesday’s announcement by weeks or months.