More Hate From the Left

Liberals can’t seem to leave anything alone, and they soil everything they touch. In another world, you might think that liberals would celebrate a woman from a middle-class background who rose in politics through sheer talent and willpower to become the first female Prime Minister of the history of Great Britain; and who then, in that position, led a renaissance that resurrected her country as an economic and military power for a generation.
Of course, that isn’t the world we live in. In this world, liberals hate that sort of achievement; even more so if the hero of the story is a woman. So they are making a movie that trashes Margaret Thatcher.
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The cameras have not even started rolling on a new film being made about Margaret Thatcher’s life in which she is expected to be played by Meryl Streep, but already the project has been tainted by controversy over the negative way it intends to portray the former Prime Minister.
On first hearing about the production last month, a member of Lady Thatcher’s family, who wishes to remain anonymous, said they were ‘appalled’ to learn that she will be depicted as a dementia sufferer looking back on her career with regret.
Describing the film as a ‘Left-wing fantasy’ designed to cast doubt on her political legacy, her relatives and supporters are once again having to accept that, where the world’s best-known female politician of the 20th century is concerned, art rarely reflects life.

The author of the linked story in the Daily Mail is one of the few people who have had access to the movie’s script. It is, apparently, appalling:

Told by means of flashbacks of her political life, the film opens with the octagenarian Lady Thatcher sitting alone in a sparsely furnished drawing room muttering to herself.
She is a melancholic, ghostly figure whose world has shrunk to almost nothing thanks to her declining mental powers. It soon becomes apparent that she frequently holds conversations with her late husband, Sir Denis, seemingly unaware that he is dead.
As the film unfolds, she sifts through some of the more controversial points of her 11-and-a-half years in office – notably the Falklands War and the Brighton bombing – questioning the decisions she made, rueful of the consequences of her extraordinary achievements.
In old age, the famous conviction politician is apparently racked by doubt; the unavoidable impression given is that this once-towering figure has been reduced to a pathetic figure consumed by doubts and fears.

Anyone who followed the ideological debates of the 1970s and 1980s knows where this is going:

In another, she dwells on her early economic policies, consumed with concerns that they may have caused considerable hardship to millions of Britons and weighing up hackneyed Left-wing arguments that her decisions did more harm than good.

Naturally, the filmmakers can’t resist getting personal:

She is shown to be haunted by the voices of past contemporaries who apparently asked her at the time: ‘But what about your children? How can you abandon them for politics?’
Developing this theme, the film focuses on Lady Thatcher’s supposedly strained relationship with her daughter, Carol. It suggests that the rigours of her lengthy career, both at Westminster and on the world stage, destroyed their precious bond, breeding an irreconcilable froideur between the pair.

Yes, that’s the anti-feminist angle that we are so used to seeing from the movie industry. In this case, of course, the producers didn’t want to take any chances; they didn’t notify Thatcher’s children that they were making the film, let alone ask for their opinions.
One of the several ironies here is that if the studio made a heroic film about the real Margaret Thatcher, quite a few people would go see it. It is hard to imagine what audience the producers imagine for what sounds like another depressing and pointless hate-fest. But, as Michael Medved showed quite a few years ago, movie producers don’t make left-wing movies to make money, they make left-wing movies because they are left-wingers. Which is also why they can get stars like Meryl Streep to star in them. The whole thing is, frankly, sickening.
Cross-posted at Ricochet.

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