There is a certain kind of obsessive, geeky political junkie for whom the prospect of a big-budget Margaret Thatcher biopic is actually thrilling. Meryl Streep as Thatcher! Jim Broadbent as Denis! Richard E. Grant – Withnail himself – as Michael Heseltine! Michael Pennington as Michael Foot! And so on. The Daily Mail gives us the trailer:
We get a shade of The King’s Speech, a lot of The Queen, and even some of The Godfather, with Broadbent in the Diane Keaton role. I think the presence of obscure-to-Americans figures, like the wild-haired and comic-villain Heseltine and Keith Joseph, will save this from some of the problems that hobbled the truly bad Clinton/Blair drama, The Special Relationship.
What other political dramas need to become movies? It stuns me that we’ve never had a good Andrew Jackson biopic (Sean Penn playing Jackson-as-president, Jonah Hill as Nicholas Biddle), or an Alexander Hamilton film that turns Jefferson into a sleazy antagonist.
