“Golda” stars Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who led her country through the crisis of the Yom Kippur War.
If you’re in a mood to binge movie history, watch this as a companion piece to 2017’s “Darkest Hour,” which featured Gary Oldman in his Oscar-winning role as Churchill.
Both films are about a nation’s survival hanging by a thread. In both, a great actor gives an expressive performance, even while buried under photo-realistic make-up. And while Churchill and Golda made historic, heroic decisions, we also see the human toll of their choices.
The film, from Israeli-born director Guy Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin , indicates that Israel is still feeling cocky after the lightning-fast victory of the Six Day War in 1967. So despite some indications of disaster, Golda and her generals are caught nearly flat-footed when Egyptian and Syrian forces slam into their borders in October of 1973.
Mirren plays Golda as a quiet, grandmotherly type who’s also decisive and shrewd—constantly chain-smoking even through the regular medical examinations for her lymphoma, which take place in a hospital that over time becomes a morgue. Her matter-of-fact habit of recording casualties in a little notebook belies her private anguish.
The war is shown here mostly through the claustrophobic settings of Golda’s existence—conference rooms, corridors, command centers where you hear, rather than see, the desperation of the combat, and a rooftop which is partly an escape, partly a bird’s eye view of the crisis.
The picture might be heavy on exposition for some, but not for us who don’t know the history very well. The film is sprinkled with some fascinating vignettes. Golda declares she won’t be taken as a POW if defeat comes. The legendary military hero, Moshe Dayan, basically has a nervous breakdown when the war breaks out. Ariel Sharon appears as a bumptious military hero who gets a prophetic warning from Meir.
And like Gary Oldman’s Churchill, Golda has to hope for salvation from a not-always-stalwart ally—the U.S. The Nixon Administration, occupied with Watergate and oil politics, is represented by Henry Kissinger (played by Liev Schreiber.) As the film shows it, Kissinger and Golda have a reserved friendship, beneath their differing agendas, and in private both can even take their little digs at Nixon!
The film postulates that Golda was a willing scapegoat for the mistakes of others. Who knows if that is History’s ultimate judgment?
In the end, “Golda” stands as one of the year’s best films, with 4.5 starts out of 5.