'The Iron Lady' and 'The Queen': On the Relationship of Thatcher and Elizabeth II

For eleven and a half years, two women met privately nearly every week, and neither ever told. The Queen and her eighth prime minister maintained perfect mutual discretion to the end — which is precisely why filmmakers can't leave the relationship alone.

Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady gives us Meryl Streep's Oscar-winning Thatcher, the audience with the sovereign glimpsed only in passing; Stephen Frears' The Queen gives us Helen Mirren's Elizabeth managing a different prime minister entirely, but its whole thesis — the Crown as a machine for outlasting politicians — is the Thatcher relationship in miniature. Watched together, the films form a diptych about two irreconcilable theories of power: conviction and continuity.

The historical record offers fragments the movies embroider: protocol friction over curtsies, the palace's reported unease at cabinet-style language, the Queen's decision to attend Thatcher's funeral — an honor she gave no other PM but Churchill. Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen, has kept returning to the seam ever since; his stage play The Audience stages the weekly meetings outright.

Both films belong to the modern boom in dramatized recent history — cinema doing what authorized biography can't, guessing at the private faces of public monuments. The guessing, of course, is the entertainment.