GOLDA. Starring Helen Mirren, Camille Cottin, Liev Schreiber, Lior Ashkenazi and Dvir Benedek. Directed by Guy Nattiv. Rated PG (Mild themes). 100 Minutes.
The film is written by co-producer, Nicholas Martin, and is English-speaking with occasional dialogue in Hebrew, that is subtitled. Golda Meir, was born Goldie Mabovitch in 1898 in Kyiv, Ukraine. She rose from a poor Jewish family to become Prime Minister of Israel in 1969 and was Israel’s and the Middle East’s first and only female prime minister. Memory of her rivals the memory of Margaret Thatcher as the ‘Iron Lady’ of politics in armed defence of her country. She helped found the State of Israel in 1948, and died of cancer in 1978. The two events that define her leadership are the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, and the 20-day Yom Kippur War in 1973 between Israel and a group of Arab countries led by Egypt and Syria. In 1975, Meir was awarded the Israel Prize for her services to the State of Israel.
Mirren masterfully negotiates the serious tensions of the various strategy meetings between Meir and her chief military advisers. Few of her advisers really understood what she was experiencing. One who did, was Henry Kissinger (Schreiber), who understood her grief.
Israel’s fight for survival makes for compelling cinema, and highlights by implication what is happening today in Israel and the Middle East. Unquestionably, the film illustrates with great force the frailty and aggressiveness of human beings fighting with each other and making human mistakes and errors of judgment en route.
In this film, we don’t see the battles, but we hear them, via archival audio recordings from the frontline. Meir listens as her troops are killed, and the film is chiefly about her tenacity, grief and resilience, which turns the movie away from being a war movie to one that is an affecting human drama. Mirren, as Golda, steers her nation forward while under unimaginable pressure, and excellent facial prosthetics help to place her right at the centre of her role – seen, for example, when Golda quietly adds up the number of casualties in her notebook while smoking one more cigarette yet again. Israeli troops are dying; Arab troops are dying; and Meir herself is dying. This is a film that captures the stress, the burden of leadership, and the personal grief of someone under great stress. Mirren is unrecognisably compelling as Meir.
The movie demonstrates how good leaders have to be to bear the weight of monumental decisions, but they also have to bear the weight of decisions made in error. Trauma is endured for better times ahead. The film is dedicated to all who lost their lives in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Nattiv, as director, has given us a character study of Mier, in visceral closeness, as a leader who eventually accepted that she must negotiate to establish peace.
Transmission Films
Released 2 May 2024