奥斯卡热门电影《铁娘子》观后感

爱思英语编者按：《铁娘子》这部传记片的背景设在1982年马岛战争期间，讲述了撒切尔如何利用这场战争稳固自己的统治地位以及在第二年获得连任的故事。主要会围绕撒切尔夫人如何突破性别、阶层的重重阻碍，从一个食品杂货商的女儿变成英国历史上第一位女首相的。影片中的其他演员还包括理查德·格兰特、安东尼·海德、奥莉薇娅·柯尔曼、罗杰·阿拉姆等人，威尼斯影帝吉姆·布劳德本特将出演撒切尔的丈夫丹尼斯·撒切尔（Denis Thatcher）。艾比·摩根担任编剧。玛格丽特·希尔达·撒切尔（Margaret Hilda Thatcher），结婚前名为玛格丽特·希尔达·罗伯茨，出生于1925年，不但是英国历史上第一位女首相，而且创造了蝉联三届，任期长达11年之久的历史纪录。她意志刚强、作风果断，因其强硬态度获得“铁娘子”之称。她曾四次访问中国，1984年在北京代表英国政府与中国签署了《中英联合声明》，为香港回归奠定了政治基础。女导演菲利达·劳埃德是戏剧导演出身，她曾以执导舞台剧闻名，第一部电影作品《妈妈咪呀！》就是根据舞台剧改编，这部影片在全球获得超过六亿美元的票房收入。

The Iron Lady

早在宣布梅丽尔·斯特里普（饰演撒切尔夫人）的那一刻，奥斯卡就已经为她预留下了一个提名席位。今这部传记片不会如流水账似的把撒切尔夫人的生平全都展现出来，而是重点聚焦1982年马岛战争期间撒切尔度过的17天，这17天也是她整个政治生涯的转捩点。吉姆·布劳德本特将在片中扮演撒切尔夫人的丈夫丹尼斯，亚历珊德拉·罗奇和哈里·劳埃德将扮演年轻时期的玛格丽特和丹尼斯。《铁娘子》将由著名的奥斯卡推手温斯坦公司发行，2011年12月30日在北美上映。

Meryl Streep's performance in The Iron Lady is astonishing, writes Robbie Collin.

“One of the great problems of our age is that we’re governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas,” says Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. “Now, thoughts and ideas – that’s what interests me.” It’s a pivotal line in director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan’s absorbing, exhilarating biopic of the United Kingdom’s only female prime minister, but the film itself doesn’t agree. The Iron Lady does not pick over thoughts and ideas for an hour and 45 minutes: Lloyd and Morgan are fascinated by who their subject was and is, and rather less by what she stood, and continues to stand for. Personality politics might have been anathema to Margaret Thatcher MP, but this film is propelled by the sheer power of her presence.

It begins with a playful shot of a bottle of milk being taken – perhaps snatched – from the shelf of a London corner shop. The elderly Lady Thatcher (Meryl Streep) has left her house to buy groceries; fumbling for change in her handbag, she seems like an exile from another era. Over breakfast, we see her talking to her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent) – except Denis died in 2003. A muddled conversation with a young aide about a concert takes her back to a theatre trip at which a young Denis (Harry Lloyd, every bit as charming here as he was as Herbert Pocket in the recent Great Expectations serialisation) playfully presented her with a sugar mouse. The film’s structure is confused, but deliberately so: events in Lady Thatcher’s present trigger vivid memories of her past. Shaping a plot around a real person’s mental decline sounds heartless, but here it’s been done compassionately, and in a way that makes narrative sense. The film has six decades of history to get through, from the Falklands War to the Poll Tax riots and the Grand Hotel bombing – better this than the kind of 'Twenty Most Important Political Moments’ checklist format that hampered Oliver Stone’s recent George W. Bush biopic.

The present-day scenes also serve as a vital coda to one of The Iron Lady’s central threads: the personal cost of power. Lloyd and Morgan want us to appreciate just how much this grocer’s daughter from Grantham had at stake when she entered the overwhelmingly stuffy, overwhelmingly male world of British politics. When Thatcher arrives at the House of Commons for the first time after being elected MP for Finchley in 1959, there’s a telling shot of her distinctive blue hat bobbing alone in a sea of half-bald heads. When a Labour member sneers that she “doth screech too much” following a Commons speech, she responds by employing a voice coach, leading to a stagy 'training montage’ in which Thatcher’s vowels and hairstyle are given a bouffant boost under the eye of Gordon Reece (Roger Allam). There’s a glimpse of camp humour here that seems to have been toned down elsewhere in the film: a line from the trailer, in which Thatcher asks a dining room full of European dignitaries “Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies?” has been lost in the edit.

Perhaps Lloyd was worried that her film had to be serious enough – she is, after all, the director whose only previous film is the £400 million-grossing, pro-celebrity karaoke tournament Mamma Mia. To say The Iron Lady is better-directed than Mamma Mia isn’t much of a compliment, but it’s true, and a few clunky images aside (a close-up of Thatcher’s feet treading on fallen rose petals as she leaves Downing Street is a stupid person’s idea of a clever shot), the film moves fluidly and feels polished and authentically cinematic.

But then, perhaps I’ve just been dazzled by Streep. In a career full of great performances, this is surely one of her greatest: the changes in her voice and posture as she moves from youthful, fire-bellied politician to elderly stateswoman develop so smoothly, you could plot them on a bell curve. As time passes, her voice slows and deepens, the corners of her mouth and eyes turn down, her walk loses speed but not purpose. Extraordinarily, at both screenings of The Iron Lady I’ve attended, an audience member has started heckling Streep as if she actually is Thatcher, and while this says something about the hecklers, it says just as much about the quality and accuracy of her work.

Awards season glory for Streep is a given, but the rest of the cast are hardly slacking: Broadbent adds lashings of pathos; Olivia Colman is an unobtrusive delight as Carol Thatcher (her brother Mark appears only as a child and on the other end of a long-distance phone call); Alexandra Roach plays the young Margaret Thatcher with grace and subtlety; and as Geoffrey Howe, Anthony Head can be sensationally dead-sheep-like when it counts.

Some viewers may be disappointed that a Thatcher biopic lacks an explicit political agenda, but the film succeeds as a drama for that very reason. Lloyd and Morgan have no intention of immortalising their subject: in fact, they do just the opposite, which those with an axe to grind will find even less palatable. They make her fully human.
 

转贴于：24EN.COM