Defending her conduct during the Yom Kippur War before a panel of grizzled men, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Helen Mirren) takes the half-smoked cigarette already dangling from her lips and instinctively, but not distractedly, uses it to light other. This idiosyncratic character beat comes early in Guy Nattiv's dull biopic, and it says a lot about the story and subject matter, and tells everything you need to know about Meir as a person and "Golda" as a movie.
That Golda is a smoker shouldn't be surprising; almost everyone is in this exact window of the period in 1973. What sets the Prime Minister apart is her stubbornness: her clarity of purpose and tenacity of intent. This cancer-stricken icon strives to light up whenever she undergoes radiation treatment, smoking less for pleasure than to defy her own not-too-distant end. That Mirren takes advantage of this tick should surprise even less, because what is a Marlboro if not an actor's best friend, a trusted partner, a gift for idle hands, a way to punctuate a line, a scene, a reading?
Director: Guy Nattiv
Writer: Nicholas Martin
Stars: Helen Mirren, Zed Josef, Claudette Williams
Which brings us back to this pregnant breath and the movie it heralds. In theory, a docudrama that relives the Yom Kippur War of 1973 from the position of power, "Golda" is, in practice, a compendium of acting affections, a spotlight on a venerable performer who offers them a stage in which that shine Tossed and tossed between conflicting tonal and narrative approaches, Nattiv's film finds its clearest identity as an awards-bait corollary for a bit of stand-up: What if they made the whole plane out of the black box? What if they made the whole movie with the film from the Oscars?
The result would be something like this. After a framing device finds Meir testifying before the Agranat Commission, a 1974 panel that investigated the intelligence failures that left the young state unprepared for the previous year's war, we flash back to the morning of October 6, 1973. , when news of an impending assault reached the Prime Minister's desk. On one side of Meir sits IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar (Lior Ashkenazi) and on the other Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger). Both offer conflicting advice, and if screenwriter Nicholas Martin's dialogue is anywhere near the historical record, the images tell a markedly different story.
The fact that the actors Ashkenazi and Heuberger (and many others in supporting roles) are Israeli and Mirren is most definitely not has hardly been lost on angry commentators, though seeing the dynamics play out on screen really resolves that tension. Because in the end, the centrifugal force of the film is Mirren, not Meir. Sure, I could do a version of this story with (what some might consider) a more ethnically appropriate leading man, but that movie wouldn't be "Golda." Indeed, the attraction here is watching an actor transform, searching for a familiar face under a mask of makeup, finding solace in his unchanging eyes.
In other words, we want to see movie stars in costume, and on that front, "Golda" delivers. And if following that mandate gives this biopic a herky-jerk quality, alternating dissonant tones to give the star a variety of notes to play, the approach has undeniable merit from scene to scene.
As the war begins, the Prime Minister and her top advisers head into bunker mode, watching as the Israeli forces suffer catastrophic losses as the sense of existential panic grows ever more acute. There is a version of this movie that fully traces this paradox of power: the sad truth that the rooms where it happens tend to be drab and banal and oh so far from the fields where victory could be snatched from the jaws of defeat. . And hey, that movie exists within "Golda," most notably in a standout sequence that finds the higher-ups listening to a failed offensive over the airwaves, while being completely powerless to intervene.
Of course, this version of real-time warfare must coexist with a host of others, including those that require a bit of irony (“You'll be made prime minister,” Meir tells a brash general who calls himself Sharon). , and those that take advantage of another key attraction of the genre: seeing how well-mediated icons behave once the cameras are turned off. Often mixing archival footage with staged re-enactments, Nattiv takes obvious pleasure when he offers that front.
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