What can I say about Meryl Streep that hasn't already been said? Her ability to immerse herself in another persona is uncanny. Just as Streep transformed herself into Julia Child, so she channels Margaret Thatcher - at least in looks and sound. If that sounds like a quibble, it is. I'm as able to willingly suspend my disbelief as anyone. And Streep is the master of facilitating illusion. She looks so much like Thatcher, she sounds so much like Thatcher, it's easy to spend considerable portions of viewing time forgetting that it's Meryl Streep that we're watching. But why must I believe that, at the end of her life, Margaret Thatcher was haunted by hallucinations of her dead husband? And if I must, why should that haunting take up so much of the film? I understand the way that screenplays work, that telling a story in a purely linear fashion can be boring, that starting at the end and telling the back story through flashbacks is a common, acceptable device. But t
MUSINGS OF AN EXPAT AMERICAN