At the end of her Wall Street Journal article, "Jobs, Thatcher and the Force of Life," Peggy Noonan writes:
Final note. We are at a point in our culture when we actually have to pull for grown-up movies, when we must try to encourage them and laud them when they come by. . . . [Note: She likes "The Iron Lady," the movie about Margaret Thatcher, starring Meryl Streep, opening Dec. 30 in the USA]. Our movie culture has descended into immaturity, deep and inhuman violence, a pervasive and flattened sexuality. It is an embarrassment.
In Iraq this year I asked an Iraqi military officer doing joint training at an American base what was the big thing he'd come to believe about Americans in the years they'd been there. He thought. "You are a better people than your movies say." He had judged us by our exports. He had seen the low slag heap of our culture and assumed it was a true expression of who we are.
And so he'd assumed we were disgusting.
On Meryl Streep's performance in "The Iron Lady," Peggy Noonan writes:
The masterpiece is Meryl Streep's portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher, which is not so much a portrayal as an inhabitation. It doesn't do justice to say Ms. Streep talks like her, looks like her, catches some of her spirit, though those things are true. It's something deeper than that, something better and more important. She tried to be Margaret Thatcher, and there's a real tribute in that.