Can a performance be too good?

Meryl Streep disappears so uncannily into former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady” that her performance overpowers the movie it’s in – a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

The problem is that filmgoers who come to “The Iron Lady” to see Streep in action will see only that: an actress at the top of her game, delivering a bravura performance – not a thoughtful, provocative portrait of one of the most consequential figures of the 20th century.

That “The Iron Lady” fails on this count, of course, isn’t the fault of Streep but of director Phyllida Lloyd, who with screenwriter Abi Morgan has made a biopic that manages to be triumphalist and insulting at the same time, reducing Thatcher’s remarkable life to a series of psycho-biographical touchpoints and superficial montages.

Framed as a sequence of flashbacks Thatcher reflects on in late retirement, “The Iron Lady” dwells at length on the mental and physical frailties that have attended her later years. The result may be a more vulnerable, sympathetic portrait than the title suggests, but it also forces the filmmakers to leave far more vital aspects of her life and career on the cutting room floor.

Instead, we get a version of Thatcher’s life that’s one part Oprah and one part Wikipedia. After an admittedly ingenious opening segment featuring an anonymous elderly Thatcher buying milk for her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent at his marvelous, open-hearted best), “The Iron Lady” takes filmgoers back to Margaret’s early years as the daughter of a conservative shop owner who, when his daughter tells him she has won a place at Oxford, tells her not to let him down. Lloyd and Morgan then tell a story that casts Thatcher both as a consummate father-pleaser and flinty feminist rebel, an impatient martinet in a bouffant and brooch who is fully capable of flirting when circumstances dictate. » Read more: The Iron Lady