Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Iron Lady
2011 · Phyllida Lloyd · The Iron Lady on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 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.
Notice where Denis appears: mirrors, the passenger seat, the breakfast table. (camera)
Elliot Davis films Broadbent's Denis exactly like anyone else in the flat. No ripple, no dissolve, no musical sting marks him as different. He is simply there, talking.
Payoff: Refusing to flag him keeps you inside her present tense, where what is here and what is recalled carry equal weight. In the reading: the crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls this a crystal-image: a present and its double held in one shot, with no way to sort them.
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 being coaxed to give away her husband's shirts and shoes. 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.
Once you have seen it
Check whether you can date each scene while you watch. (structure)
The film mixes a present-day flat, a Grantham shop, and a cabinet room without signposts. On a second pass the question of when stays open much longer than you remember.
Payoff: Stop asking whether the film is fair to Thatcher. Ask what year you are in. That is its real subject.
Watch the Falklands and the miners' strike go by in minutes. (cutting)
Whole political epochs arrive as brisk montage scored by Thomas Newman, while a woman sorting shirts gets scene after unhurried scene. The proportions are deliberate.
Payoff: History rushes past a figure who has gone still. The speed of those montages is the point of them. In the reading: movement of the world. The reading calls this the movement of the world: the person stops and events flow around her instead.
Look at the hair, the suits, and the handbag across eras. (setting)
Costume and makeup track a persona assembled piece by piece and then worn down. Coulier and Helland's aging work lets one actor hold forty years in the same face.
Payoff: The armor was manufactured deliberately, and it comes apart from the inside while still holding its outward shape.
Carry this in: Watch for the moments you cannot date. That is where the film lives, inside a mind losing its own order.