GOLDA

WARTIME LEADER MUSTERS A VICTORY OUT OF DEFIANCE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The swath of land set aside as a homeland for the Jewish people surviving the Holocaust must be defended over and over again from the Arab neighbors not much more than a stone throw away from Jerusalem.

Helen Mirren becomes Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in defense of the Jewish nation during the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Golda (2023).

Mirren wears a nose and facial prosthetic for the performance as the Israeli senior statesperson. Prosthetics designer Suzi Battersby creates that unmistakable visage of the biographical character for Mirren.

But only Mirren is able to bring the character together with that genuinely apologetic sincerity in her eyes that accompany that unmistakable pace of speech and use of language. Mirren delivers those blunt words of biting wisdom for which Golda Meir is known.

Camille Cottin plays the Prime Minister’s personal secretary, Lou Kaddar. And Ohad Knoller has a brief appearance as Ariel Sharon introducing a battle plan that is forecast to fail and actually does fail tragically when the strategy is eventually deployed.

The 1 hour 40 minute runtime suffices to make the point for a script highly focused on a specific event that captures the true biographical character, instead of a sweeping retrospective that loses a lot of details in the broad brush strokes required to cover so many decades and so many events.

Director Guy Nattiv creates tone and atmosphere with the sparing use of multi-media, black and white news reels and the interior lighting of the era.

The opening scenes spin the paranoia around yet another rumor of the possibility of war by using layers of transparencies from an overhead projector showing the geopolitics of the region.

Mirren talks Golda’s way out of this historical patterning with the artful grace of an accomplish actor.

Nattiv has good creative moments with the camera but too many static scenes are created for the discussions about military strategy in a singular room. These scenes are occasionally made a bit more interesting with the use of a score.

Composer Dascha Dauenhauer drips in the score with plucking strings and tapping percussion instruments to drive scenes in the military situation room and in the bunker type hallways with Meir and Kaddar walking toward the situation room.

Three stories are brought together like the transparencies for the overhead projector in the opening scenes. One story is the defense of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, October 6-25, 1973. A second story is that of the health of the protagonist who chain smokes her way through almost every scene. And a third story is that of a civilian inquiry into the government’s decision-making during the war.

Nattiv could have easily added another 20 minutes of runtime by developing a bit further bits and pieces of character development that at one point looked like they were leading into a series of character vignettes. But he didn’t.

Rami Heuberger shows General Moshe Dayan as having a bit of an existential crisis after hearing of the heavy military losses early in the war. Dayan also has this moment of horror in a helicopter overlooking the live fighting front that indicates his personal story is about to unravel on screen. But it doesn’t.

And then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is waiting in the West Wing at the United States Capitol.

Newsreel footage foreshadows character developments further down the narrative, such as black and white images of Kissinger landing in Jerusalem as transition art for Liev Schreiber stepping into Golda Meir’s home as Kissinger.

Schreiber is able to create a bit of a presence throughout the film with just a few brief moments on camera, including those brief moments on the phone from Washington DC and in person in the home of Golda Meir.

The film is a vignette of Golda Meir as opposed to being a series of vignettes of several characters important to the story around and about Golda Meir.

If Nattiv does have an overall vision for the film, that theme would have to have something to do with investigations and introspection and the thousands of revisions required to defend and succeed.

Golda (2023) is currently showing in theaters.