Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Iron Lady
2011 · Phyllida Lloyd · The Iron Lady on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count the gray suits in the room and then find Thatcher. (staging)
Lloyd blocks the Commons and Cabinet scenes like opera. Thatcher is repeatedly the only woman in frames packed with men in identical tailoring, and the composition keeps her separate even when she is winning.
Payoff: The film makes its case about gender with blocking rather than dialogue. You can count it shot by shot.
Watch for the object or sound that starts each flashback. (cutting)
Justin Wright cuts by trigger. A piece of clothing, a chant, a phrase tips the film out of the flat and into decades earlier. Nothing announces the jump in advance.
Payoff: The structure runs on association instead of chronology. You are inside a mind that cannot keep its own order. In the reading: sheets of past / order of coexistence. The reading calls these sheets of past: eras that coexist and get shuffled rather than lining up in sequence.
Listen to the pitch of Streep's voice across the flashbacks. (performance)
The young Margaret speaks higher and faster. Coaching lowers and steadies the voice into an instrument of command. In the present-day scenes Streep lets that instrument fray.
Payoff: The voice was built on purpose. You can hear it being made and hear it coming apart.
Look at the clothes Thatcher keeps sorting and setting aside. (setting)
The present-day story is mostly a woman going through her closets while family and staff keep asking. She keeps finding reasons to stop.
Payoff: A twentieth-century political epic hangs off one small domestic task she will not finish.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the moments you cannot date. That is where the film lives, inside a mind losing its own order.