The Iron Lady - film review

An elderly, senile, yet elegant lady does the shopping and then returns home to reminisce the past events with her (dead) husband. Dejecting and magnificent is the recent biography of Margaret Thatcher, masterfully starred as by Meryl Streep (this year’s Oscar for best actress prize winner).

The film’s plot runs as a series of retrospections, bringing back the most important moments of Mrs Thatcher’s (nee Roberts) life, interspersed throughout the daily struggle with dementia and beginnings of Alzheimer.

I cannot tell how reliable the depiction of Ms Roberts’ early life is, but from the film you can learn that upbringing and influence of her father, who ran a grocery, shaped her economic views, instilled extraordinary strength in her and familiarised her with the taste of deprivation. Margaret Roberts looms as a clever, prudent and determined young girl, with good grasp of basic laws of microeconomics. Adolescent Margaret’s way is uphill. She grows up when women are still seen as inferior and many realms of life and social activity are still no-go for the weaker sex. This does not change with years and is best illustrated in the scene when she enter the parliament for the first time. Men’s room is fit for entertainments typical for males, in the bathroom you can see urinals, behind the door with “women” board you would not notice anything else, but a chair and ironing board.

The strength of Mrs Thatcher has its dark sides. Her deeds are marked by obstinacy (refusal to change course). Her belief in the power of entrepreneurship, faith in perfection of the free market, one-sided disapproval of trade unions are slightly naïve, slightly cruel and suggest her perception of economics is over-simplified. If everything was as simple, as in her mind, she would not have become such a controversial figure. The shock therapy she applied to the ailing British economy was painful, but justified. With hindsight we see shock of the first years of her rule when unemployment soared and industrial output plummeted and we the subsequent turnaround. The choices she had to make were difficult and as a prime minister, she would always remain stalwart and unrelenting. She pursued the retrenchment programme despite backlash, put down protesting workers from unprofitable mines. Having slashed expenses for social care, she did not hesitate to spend millions of pounds on the Falklands war, winning which was a matter of honour. Her self-pride and conviction of her own infallibility, combined with not caring about the image, have ousted her from the seat of Tory leader. In her last months of serving as prime minister, Mrs Thatcher is depicted as full-of-herself, cold-hearted manager trying force her own ideas upon others, such as in the case of the community charge, seen by many as unfair and as another move into redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich.

The film is worth seeing not only as a whole work, but also for a few absolutely outstanding scenes.
1. The proposal scene – and Margaret’s speech in which she warns Dennis she would not be a silent wife standing by her husband’s side and would never like to end up washing up a teacup (watch out for the last scene then!).
2. The moment when she pulls out from outside her house to leave for parliament in 1959, and her children scream to ask her to stay, but she, with stone-cold face, sets her car in motion, does not look back and trespasses into the world of politics.
3. The scene when she announces her family she is going to run for a leadership of the Conservative party. Her children, who have always held it against their mother, that her commitment into public life was at the expense of family life, simply leave the kitchen, while her husband, usually supportive, this time does not try to hide his disapproval. Left alone in the kitchen, Mrs Thatcher asks: “When did I lose track of everyone?”. The scene is an unbeatable illustration of traps one can fall into when making a career without taking heed of their near and dear ones.
4. The scene when old Mrs Thatcher visits a doctor and complains that “people do not think anymore, people feel” and sees the shift from thinking to feeling the major cause or how the world looks like. And here I could stop and muse about “think vs. feel”, as it would be a great topic for a separate post.
I try to think and feel as much as I can, mix the two, but at the end of the day thinking takes over…

The film reminded me about my old longing for a politician who would step in to rule Poland, carry out necessary but unpopular reforms, and after four years would step down in disgrace, with support in polls below 5%, but leaving the country healed of its economic woes. With politicians focused on popularity with voters, this will not work…

From psychological perspective, Mrs Thatcher is depicted as tough outside, but it is hard to determine, whether she is equally tough inside. When she writes a letter to mothers of soldiers killed in the Falklands war, the surely shows she remains a sensitive woman, but is she all the time?

And people we meet on our way – are they tough or fragile, do they show their real psyche, or do they pretend. With four combinations:
1. fragile outside, fragile inside,
2. tough outside, tough inside,
3. fragile outside, tough inside,
4. fragile inside, tough outside,
first and second are sincere, third is improbable, but could be typical for mercenary ones who play on other people’s emotions to reach their goals, the fourth is, maybe sadly, more and more often seen. The world we live in makes us act as strong, while inside we may still be weak. It might be only a matter of time when this picture falls apart…

So in life, it is best to strike a healthy balance between toughness and fragility… Did the Iron Lady learn that lesson?

Benevolence

This year, the time has come. In the past years, before Christmas I promised myself to share some of my wealth with the ones in need. I know, it is a but hypocritical, it is done only around Christmas, because everyone else does it and later people forget for the rest of the year. In the past years my low income was a lame excuse to confine to a few zlotys, this year I decided it was high time to endow some foundations and charities. I began to earn some “real” money, next year my earnings will be really decent, so apart from paying taxes which are aimed at redistributing wealth, I should help my fellow men off my own bat.

In the past days, when I had some free time (scarce commodity) I have pondered upon this issue. The topic triggers a lot of questions, concerning legitimacy, percentage of income that should be shared with others, discretion, moral duty and many more.

Virtually everyone agrees the disadvantaged should be given aid. Opinions how to do it wisely vary. In socialists’ view, the state should be solely responsible for redistributing wealth. The richer should under constraint pay not only higher taxes, but should also give to the state apparatus a higher percent of their income. Liberals, in turn, claim it should be the civil society that takes over function of helping the poor. People, as they say, can set up foundations and charity organisations and endowing them should be a moral duty.

Both approaches have substantial downsides. The statist one assumes the state is omnipotent and will allocate the collected resources effectively. This is impossible – the whole bureaucratic apparatus costs too much and will never be effective – once we had such system in which the state oversaw everything and it failed. The liberal one carries a naïve assumption people will be ready to share their wealth with the worse-off, which is overtly false. Most people are greedy and even if they do it, they will give out only a tiny percent of their earnings. Here there is a fix for it. In many Anglo-Saxon societies donating large sum to charities is a benchmark of one’s social status. There is some bit of pressure from society. But if it was not about boasting about the endowment on a party, would they be ready to give their money away that eagerly? I realise it is better that giving no money at all; no matter if the well-off outbid one another who donates more, the disadvantaged benefit from this. My take on the issue is similar to my view of CSR – most companies do it to maintain a good image, not because they care about those parentless children. Mechanics of the endowment is identical – people do it because they care about their prestige, benevolence is just a side effect.

And I have also realised that even if I was most open-handed I could afford, my contributions would still be hypocritical. I could not sympathise with beneficiaries of my help, just because I have never experienced homelessness, famine, shortage of money, severe illness or any other kind of misery. No big tragedy has affected me yet, my family have, thank God, never been destitute. But on the other hand, as I have also never experienced luxuries, I feel I am in between. Much above me are those whose opulence would dazzle me, much below are those whose poverty is beyond my comprehension. Probably the bigger the gap is, the harder it is to take in a fellow man’s woe.

In addition, giving money is taking the path of least resistance. I may have fewer banknotes in my wallet, by bank account may be credited and the strain is over. Good deed is done, conscience is clear. It is not that simple, as long as I still avert experiencing misery.

Also a man’s wealth determines his problems. For people who struggle to make ends meet, the problem might be if they will not run out of cash to buy bread for children. For those a bit better off, who surely can afford to stock up on bread and smoked hams, the problem might be paying for a child’s school trip abroad. The richer you are, the further from scraping along your problems are. A reason to complain for my colleagues might be that they can afford only a suit for 1,000 PLN rather than five times more expensive one. Or, as this year, that the Christmas bonus was not an equivalent of new compact car’s value, as it was in the years of prosperity (2006 or 2007).

Yesterday I had a Christmas party in my office. It was thrown in an empty unfinished sizeable room in our office building in the very centre of Warsaw. Looking outside the windows could you see Palace of Culture, hotels, busy streets full of well-off people running pre-Christmas errands in haste. Food and drink was in abundance, everyone was pleased to get together… I wonder if I was the only one who thought about families who cannot make ends meet during the party. Once again the Band Aid’s song reverberated in my head…

It's Christmas time

There's no need to be afraid

At Christmas time, we let in light and we banish shade

And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy

Throw your arms around the world at Christmas time

But say a prayer

Pray for the other ones

At Christmas time it's hard, but when you're having fun

There's a world outside your window

And it's a world of dread and fear

Where the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears

And the Christmas bells that ring there

Are the clanging chimes of doom

Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you

And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time

The greatest gift they'll get this year is life

Where nothing ever grows

No rain nor rivers flow

Do they know it's Christmas time at all

Here's to you raise a glass for everyone

Spare a thought this Yuletide for the deprived

If the table was turned would you survive

Here's to them underneath that burning sun

You ain't gotta feel guilt, just selfless

Give a little help to the helpless

Do they know it's Christmas time at all

Feed the world, feed the world, feed the world

Feed the world, feed the world

Let them know it's Christmas time again

Does anyone hear “the clanging chimes of doom”?
Is anyone thankful “tonight thank God it's them instead of you”?

But Polish bankers are not as spoilt as their counterparts from the City or Wall Street. Here the banking system is totally different (in Poland investment banking is just fledging and will never develop for good after Mr Crisis spelled the death of it) – there is no such depravity, earnings and bonuses are not sky-high and expectations are different. More about one depiction of London’s bankers circle in the New Year’s Day post!