GOLDA does not take the traditional route in telling the story of the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Instead, it focuses on the defining moment of her political career, a moment that made her, in the closing coda to the film, a hero abroad and controversial in her own country. It is a portrait etched in the tension of global politics that informed Israel’s ability to defend itself, in the grief for the lives lost in that defense, and the decisions that led to them during the nineteen days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It is also a portrait of strength that is tough but not hard. And it is the portrait of a politician, as she described herself, who was one of the 20th century’s most consummate.
Helen Mirren, in wig and prosthetics to coarsen her features and swell her legs and torso, is dynamic without the usually attendant kineticism. This is a role that demands the subtlety of that ci-mentioned politician, as well as intelligence and humanity. Set in a film that is spare, she the center, and the camera keeps its lens on Mirren with an intimacy that is never static, allowing her a performance that relies little on words. Nor does it need to, though the ripostes for which Meir was famous are here. With the lens tight on her face as it registers anger, weariness, impatience, fear, and, in rare instances, the profound sadness of knowing that any decision she makes, any negotiation she botches, could spell the destruction of her country, emotions that are palpable but to which Meir does not give way. It is the expression on her face as she carefully records the casualties of each military action over the two weeks of the war, the mouth set firmly, the writing neat and precise as she accepts the responsibility for each life lost. It is the way she looks at her secretary (Ellie Piercy), taking notes at a cabinet meeting, when she realizes that the woman’s son is in one of the divisions being sent into combat, a look of infinite compassion and of the resignation of necessity. It is the tiny details, as when listening to the radio transmissions from the front during a battle that will decide everything, she draws blood when clenching her fists, regarding the red spreading on her fingers with an impassive face, and one of mild surprise. The mild impatience at having to relinquish a cigarette to begin the top-secret cobalt radiation treatment that staved off her lymphoma but didn’t lessen the pain or weakness it brought. The filmmakers show her walking to those treatments through the morgue, the better to keep it secret, Mirren regarding the neatly shelved corpses with a look that acknowledges the inevitability of death, but a look that still exudes quiet defiance.
The action of the war takes place for us via those radio transmissions. Meir in the command center in Tel Aviv listening as a trap about which she had been warned is sprung leading to a rout of her troops. Her legendary general Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger), throwing up as he surveys the first battle from the air while listening to the soldiers realize that they are doomed. As has been said so often, the mind can imagine worse things than a camera can show, and so it is here, capturing the terror with those voices as those who sent them there listen helplessly from afar. It creates the immediacy of war even in the scenes where strategy is argued. Cigarette packs standing in for army maneuvers become more than grim stand-ins, especially when the brands Battlefield and Missile.
It also brings immediacy to the delicate negotiations between Meir and Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), as the latter explains to Meir that the United States can’t risk losing Saudi oil by sending aid. The machinations of global politics clashing with survival has never been more expertly explicated. When Meir, taking a break from the situation tells her personal assistant (Camille Cottin), and surrogate family, that she will not be taken alive, the possibility becomes a potent reminder of what Israel and Meir are facing. There is nothing theoretical about any of it.
There is also the pointed contrast that sums up the balance of power between nations by seeing Meir’s home, a modest house in which Meir herself serves cake to her generals, and the opulence of Kissinger’s office and his bedroom.
By framing the story with the post-war government inquiry into Meir’s actions before and during the Yom Kippur War, GOLDA does more than tell Meir’s side of the story. To see her seated before a panel of old, white, male civilians is an optic that is rife with gender politics. It also serves to show what happens then the political necessity of the moment are stripped away as current events give way to history. It is only fitting that the first image we have of Meir is the wreath of smoke drifting up from the cigarettes she chain-smoked. The swirling manifesting the complicated intrigues around her stemming from realpolitik to the personalities that worked both with and against her.
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