More Like Bronze
A strong performance, in a mediocre biopic, about a divisive historical figure? Must be awards season.
Golda
Director: Guy Nattiv • Writer: Nicholas Martin
Starring: Helen Mirren, Lior Ashkenazi, Camille Cottin, Rami Heuberger, Liev Schreiber, Rotem Keinan
UK / USA • 1hr 40mins
Opens Hong Kong September 21 • IIB
Grade: B-
You know the movie Golda. You know exactly what it will feel like on your way out. Earnestly directed by Guy Nattiv, who made both the Oscar-winning race relations short Skin and the feature that it’s kinda sorta related to, and earnestly written by Nicholas Martin (Florence Foster Jenkins), Golda comes from the Good Lead Performance By An Oscar Nominee About An Interesting Though Problematic Historical Figure In An Okay Biopic genre. Think Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour, or Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, or Renée Zellweger in Judy. In fact this is star Helen Mirren’s second kick at the can; she was The Queen after all. None of those films really told you much about the central figure, and you didn’t come away from any of them with a deeper understanding of how they performed in their roles as PM, PM, Hollywood legend and ruling monarch. It’s probably an impossible feat. Maybe filmmakers should give up?
Golda unfolds against a flat, nicotine-coloured backdrop of deserts, linoleum-lined corridors, and the semi-hushed spaces of cushy living rooms where future prime ministers can grab a piece of cake to sustain them through a bombing campaign. Beginning with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s summons to appear before the Agranat Commission, convened to determine whether or not she screwed up big time and essentially allowed the Yom Kippur War (which, for the record, is right... now) to happen, what follows is a perfunctory play-by-play of the 1973 conflict. We watch Meir try and juggle saving Israeli lives while beating back incursion on two fronts, honouring international treaties by outwitting her enemies, politically wooing the Americans, and enduring chemotherapy treatments, all while hobbling around on sore feet and thickened ankles as she tries to live up to the nickname, The Iron Lady. Thatcher picked up the name after Meir died in 1978 I guess. Evidently there’s only room for one steely female politician at a time. Gandhi went with “Mother Indira”. Different vibe. I digress.
The OG Iron Lady
After swearing her oath and taking a seat, Meir recounts the lead-up to the war, and we meet the major players: spy and Mossad director Zvi Zamir (Rotem Keinan) who tries to raise the alarm about Egypt and Syria planning an attack; unstable Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger); Meir’s Chief of staff David Elazar (Lior Ashkenazi); IDF general Haim Bar-Lev (Dominic Mafham); and perhaps most importantly Meir’s trusted assistant Lou Kaddar (Camille Cottin, A Haunting in Venice), who efficiently hides all signs of cancer from Meir’s cabinet. As things on the Golan and Sinai fronts go from bad to worse, Meir looks to the US and inside ally, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber, creepily on point), for some back-up. He kicks her a few planes and eventually, Meir and Israel come out of the 19-day conflict victorious. She dies, but Egyptian president and antagonist Anwar Sadat wins the Nobel Prize.
Of course, if you don’t know before why Meir is such a towering figure on the Middle Eastern landscape, or why the current Energy Crisis is not the first Energy Crisis, or why the early-1970s were such a critical part of Israel’s evolution, or why Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal was a factor in not giving Israel planes, or you don’t remember who Leonid Brezhnev was, well, suffice it to say you’re not going to know much more after Golda either, other than that the woman was a hard core chainsmoker.
Nattiv and Martin try to position Golda as a wartime character study, and attempt to humanise a woman who, like most other politicians, remains a divisive figure. She says it herself, to military general Ariel Sharon – yes, that Ariel Sharon – that all political careers end in failure. She ends the comment with a wry snort, and it’s in that moment that the more compelling portrait of the woman that might have been reveals itself. When she’s not shrouded in a swirling cloud of smoke, Nattiv and Mirren make Meir over as your favourite bubbie: tired and achy from a long day watching tanks cross the Suez Canal, but gutted to the core about sending young men to their deaths. We watch her increasing distress over that every time she runs into stenographer Shir Shapiro (Ellie Piercy), who tells the PM she has a son down by the Suez.
Getting inside the head of someone like Meir – or Churchill, or QEII – isn’t easy, and for every one of us that thinks “Dick move,” another will think “Genius.” Despite Mirren’s relatively strong turn as Meir, Golda just kind of sits there, neither enlightening, nor infuriating or even wildly inaccurate enough to really work up a lather about. There’s zero conjecture about Meir’s ability (or not) to govern as the region’s sole woman head of state (to date) and it doesn’t dare wade into a debate on Middle East relations. Mirren is a better actor, who deserves a better part, and Meir is a more complex political actor that deserves better analysis. Golda’s too bland for either. — DEK
*Golda was reviewed during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, it wouldn't exist.