Presumably intended as a more or less accurate chronicle of the life of Margaret Thatcher, "The Iron Lady" provides a compelling contrast to "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," which overlaps in time some of the years during which she governed England. While "Tinker, Tailor" confronts the decline of British power and values, "The Iron Lady" offers a vision of British triumphalism, suggesting that the first female prime minister in fact revitalized the nation and even revived a memory of empire.

The picture begins somewhere in the present, with the aged, feeble Thatcher (Meryl Streep) shopping for groceries and returning home to report the shocking price of milk to her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent). As the story makes clear, however, she suffers from hallucinations - Denis, who died a long time before, exists only in her mind. As the movie shifts back and forth through time, showing important moments in Thatcher's life, Denis frequently pops up to converse with her, the odd, chatty ghost of an apparently amiable drunk.

Those imagined visits provide the motive for the long series of recollections that constitutes the method of the film, the intertwining of their life together and, obviously much more important, the course of her impressive political career. The daughter of a grocer who also served in public office, she worked in her father's business and imbibed his belief in free enterprise and individual effort. Her acceptance at Oxford enabled her to rise to a higher social level and apparently inspired her to follow a political career in the Conservative party.

The young Margaret Roberts (Alexandra Roach) fights the Tory prejudice against a female candidate and, with the support of the young Denis Thatcher (Harry Lloyd), eventually wins election to Parliament, beginning her historic climb to the heights of her party, her nation, and the international community. According to the movie, that ascent involved some sacrifices in her personal life, as it essentially alienated her children and on one occasion provoked Denis into an informal separation.

Her rise also took a toll on England, as she applied the principles she learned from her father to her office, following the usual conservative practices of cutting aid to the poor and the unemployed, imposing harsh restrictions on public employees' salaries, and destroying unions; her policies weakened the power of the working classes and created a whole new generation of millionaires. Using newspaper headlines and a considerable amount of newsreel footage, the picture shows the many demonstrations, riots, and violent attacks that those policies inspired. The Irish Republican Army assassinated some of her political allies and even exploded a bomb at the Tory convention, killing several participants and narrowly missing Thatcher herself.

Like Ronald Reagan, her closest political ally, and both Presidents Bush, when Thatcher's policies grew unpopular and her grip on office weakened, she took her country to war (remember the invasions of Grenada, Panama, and of course, Iraq?), in her case over the Falkland Islands. Apparently as nationalistic and sheeplike as Americans, the English united behind her and celebrated her great victory.

Whether intentionally or not, "The Iron Lady" paints a generally uninspiring picture of both a personal and a political life. Throughout the picture, even in ordinary dinner table conversations Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher speaks entirely in plangent platitudes, uttering over and over the usual bromides about individual initiative, the free market, and the need to take money from the poor to help them out and give it to the rich for the same reason. She demonstrates the familiar, noxious tendency to mistake arrogance for leadership, recalcitrance for strength, and bullying for courage.

Meryl Streep's talent and skill make her Margaret Thatcher believable, but never in any way attractive; instead, she seems a cold, almost inhuman woman, insulting to both political supporters and enemies, at times merely a common scold. Although her almost uncanny performance deserves some praise, and the picture provides yet another fine vehicle to showcase her remarkable abilities, even she cannot rescue this dull, dismal, depressing work. Whatever the achievements or failures of Margaret Thatcher, however anyone values her life and career, even her most devoted supporters and the most fervent Anglophiles should regard "The Iron Lady" as what a Briton would call "bloody awful."