Photo © Bleecker Street
Helen Mirren in 'Golda'
Helen Mirren in 'Golda'
Great acting means suspending the ego of actors, allowing them to disappear inside the characters they play. By that measure, Helen Mirren’s performance in Golda ranks with greatness. Mirren becomes Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during the most challenging weeks of her public life, the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Directed by Guy Nattiv, Golda opens with a brief, incomplete montage of Israeli history: 1948 and the Six Day War (1967) with passing mention of dispossessed Palestinians. Those are subjects for different movies that deserve to be made. As Golda’s story begins, Meir faces a board of inquiry after the Yom Kippur War whose members demand: Why was Israel asleep as Egypt and Syria massed forces for what their leaders hoped was the final strike against the Jewish state? Most of the film is a flashback to that war’s desperate 19 days, a conflict that disrupted the world economy and threatened to overspill into a showdown between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Kudos to Golda’s costume and make-up crews. Mirren’s Meir is wizened and wrinkled, her steel wool hair pulled back in a severe bun, dragging a heavy handbag and wearing sensible shoes. She’s the walking image of someone’s grandmother, but her family was Israel, politically contentious and beset by enemies. And this is 1973, when women were rare in high office anywhere in the world.
Mirren goes deep inside the image to find a tough, stubborn, compassionate woman troubled by the problems of old age. Even when smuggled into a hospital for secret radiation treatments, the cigarette needs to be pried from her lips as she lays on the gurney. She worries about the onset of dementia. Once in a while she forgets a small point but marshals all her reserves in a government of men whose unbuttoned machismo isn’t an act but a necessity during a perpetual state of siege.
As for why Israel was unprepared for war, the film largely blames Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the eye-patched victor of the Six Day War, for arrogantly ignoring the Mossad’s warnings of Egyptian-Syrian plans to attack. When the fighting begins, Dayan collapses. “I need you on your feet,” Meir tells him. “Go home, wash your face—and snap out of it.” She’s no fool. Just in case he can’t snap out of it, she tells Dayan’s subordinate to “take no orders from him.”
In Mirren’s memorable performance Meir has her own moments of breakdown, gripped by anxiety and nightmare, haunted by memories of the brutality her family endured in Ukraine before immigrating to the U.S. (she lived in Milwaukee from 1906 to 1921). She is believable and sympathetic regardless of one’s position on the region’s politics. And Mirren isn’t the only cast member to disappear into her role. Liev Schreiber plays Henry Kissinger at the peak of his power, nailing the accent and the mannerisms of America’s Machiavellian Secretary of State.
