In The Iron Lady, we were hungering for a great political film.

We did not get it. Instead, Meryl Strep as Margaret Thatcher, which is almost worth the price of admission on a Tuesday night, served us up a master class in acting.

Thatcher is portrayed as an old woman shut up in her house, losing her memory, beset with visions of her past, measuring out her life washing teacups in a porcelain sink, something she vowed she would never end up doing. This is supposed to pass for high irony. We are even given the ghost of her husband, Denis Thatcher, dead these many years, but who seems determined to hang around like one of Dickens’ spirits from A Christmas Carol.

There is no need to resort to droll ghosts to flesh out the only woman ever to hold the post as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Winning two majority governments, Thatcher completely transformed Great Britain’s postwar politics. She helped Ronald Reagan pursue his Cold War agenda. The Western world, but especially England, is still dealing with the aftermath of her catastrophic politics, her war on labour unions, her hunting of the poor, her discourse, her iron government.

The film is tone deaf politically. Thatcher did all these things but one has to look hard in the film for any explanation of why. In the film, one riot is quickly succeeded by another riot – but we never understand why the many were rioting against the few. In some ways the film resembles much of the reporting of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where there is no complete explanation given as to why the movement caught fire and, in detail, what the demands were. The Tobin tax on financial transactions is but one demand seldom mentioned.

The Thatcher era had plenty of fire and brimstone the film could have tapped into. It was the time when 10 Irish protesters died of hunger in British-run prisons in Northern Ireland, including Bobby Sands. Protesting her war on the poor, there were riots in Brixton and other working-class neighbourhoods across the U.K. The Clash was playing on the radio, and people camped in unoccupied houses known as "squats." One in ten houses in London was uninhabited and belonged to speculators.

The film is successful in one dimension. It depicts Thatcher taking on the "toffs," the old boys in the old boys’ clubs, looking down their long noses at this upstart woman. We see her sitting as the only woman in an all-male cabinet. There are some wonderful scenes on the benches in the British Parliament. Again almost all men, usually bested by daddy’s girl.

She was christened Margaret Roberts. She wanted to impress her father, who was a shopkeeper and a modest member of the Conservative party. Margaret decided that she would defy social constraints on women, with the support of her husband Denis, and stand again for Parliament after losing a first time.

If the filmmakers wanted to humanize the Iron Lady, they succeeded. But they have robbed her of her ideas. They haven’t explained to us why she was so tough, why she was so determined.

I was in London and Northern Ireland in 1981, the year Thatcher rid the Cabinet of all opposition, the people she described as the "wets." Wets are the people we once called Progressive Conservatives, but even here in Canada they all perished politically at the hands of our own version of the Iron Lady, Stephen Harper.

In some ways Stephen Harper is the successor to Margaret Thatcher: His belief in free market forces, his dislike of elites, his devotion to the agenda of business, his cold public persona.

Harper is less bold than Thatcher. He is carefully modulated and parsed, his message completely controlled. Thatcher was prone to grand pronouncements. As the Argentine junta discovered to their peril after invading the Falkland Islands, Thatcher almost never backed down.

Harper has said that when he is through, no one will recognize Canada, the kind of vow Thatcher would like.

Going back to The Iron Lady, if this is the big film about Thatcher then history is badly served. It tries so hard to be apolitical it ends up being only a parable about the costs of power, and lonely old age.