There is far more softness than steel in "The Iron Lady," starring Meryl Streep as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The film catches her long after she's left the public eye. It is a portrait of the strong-willed leader humbled* by age.

    Director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan do not follow the traditions of film biographies and choose to construct a memory poem. The film is highly personal. Even the political highs and lows that come to Thatcher in flashbacks* are of a more private kind: How lonely she felt as a woman in a man's world. Why she was willing to lose the hat, but not the pearls, during a campaign media makeover.

    Back in present day reality, she walks around her house as if she were being watched. And when no one is looking, she carries on conversations with her much-loved late husband Denis.

    Thatcher was a shopkeeper's daughter, watching her father work long hours. As the daughter of a small business owner, she had little patience* with the labor unions that she felt were breaking the country's economic back. Though she never identified herself as a feminist*, she always felt the outsider in a Parliament occupied by Britain's mostly male upper class.

    Designer Marese Langan ("The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," "A Mighty Heart") does a remarkable job of taking away and putting years on Streep as she moves from Thatcher's late 30s to her 80s. But mostly, it is Streep's ability to disappear inside her characters that is striking.

    This is the director's second feature film and the second time she's had Streep as a star. The first is 2008's musical "Mama Mia!." Perhaps because of Lloyd's theater background, both films feel like a series of loosely linked set pieces — plays in 15-or-so acts.

    What helps improve the film is the insight* Streep brings to Thatcher's aging; she catches every one of the emotional changes that get to the truth of the matter. But if you come expecting keen insight into her long political life, or even something as simple as why the Soviets called her the Iron Lady, consider a trip to the library instead.

    (SD-Agencies)