The Iron Lady Trailer: Queen Elizabeth with Hairspray

The trailer for Dark Knight Rises came out, but you already knew that, didn't you? In all the hubbub, the trailer for The Iron Lady was also released, and I'll be interested to see how well it reflects the finished product. Growing up as the daughter of a man of progressive tastes, I was raised on a steady diet of gritty British social dramas of the 1980s. Acceptable video rentals were children's cartoons... or anything directed by Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Stephen Frears, so Margaret Thatcher was my childhood boogeywoman. As Voldemort was to other kids, Thatcher- and to a lesser degree, Ronald Reagan- was to me. So I was surprised to see a trailer that made the Iron Lady out to be the heiress to the Virgin Queen. It makes me think of the spot for Elizabeth: The Golden Age more than My Beautiful Laundrette. If a filmmaker has a different ideological bent than mine, I suppose he can find more heroism in Thatcher's story than I can, since I think of her as a viper in pearls. But any movie, no matter how conservative, that casts the Falklands War as some sort of grand, just war I find both morally and factually questionable. Not that I was any great fan of the Argentinean junta, but as Jorge Louis Borges said, the Falklands War was like "a fight between two bald men over a comb." Well, it seems that the director, Phyllida Lloyd, has chosen to add driving strings to that comb fight.