REVIEW: Golda [2023]

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 100 minutes
Release Date: August 25th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Bleecker Street Media
Director(s): Guy Nattiv
Writer(s): Nicholas Martin

I’m a politician, not a soldier!

Director Guy Nattiv says it himself: Golda is neither a biopic nor a war movie. And it’s precisely because of this fact that it has stumbled in its attempt to captivate audiences. Because while Nicholas Martin’s script does humanize Golda Meir (Helen Mirren) with depictions of her cancer and heartbreak in the knowledge her secretary’s son has probably perished in an offensive she approved, it never quite gives us anything to hold onto. Its drama lies in the reactions of people playing God and pulling strings. Of watching as they listen to discover if their guesswork succeeded. It’s a lot of bloated suspense.

The circumstances are personal for Nattiv, though. His family was there when the Yom Kippur War began, protecting him as a three-month old child while the sirens blared. It’s personal for many who lost family in battles described onscreen as slaughters. Maybe a peace treaty with Egypt (wherein Anwar El-Sadat called Israel by its name) coming out of the tragedy makes things better. Maybe not. I guess that’s why the end text describes Meir as a hero abroad but controversial at home. She made hard choices. She’s ultimately responsible for many deaths. But, as the film tells it, she never denied her culpability. She owned it.

So, portraying those nineteen days from her perspective does hold intrigue. She was dying. She was a “custodian” Prime Minister who herself declares she’s a politician and not a soldier. This isn’t what she wanted to do. It was instead what she needed to do. Working from declassified accounts of conversations in her war room definitely adds authenticity to the whole as a result. But it is still just people standing, staring, and waiting.

It’s Golda lighting another cigarette. Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger) shaking with guilt and fear. David ‘Dado’ Elazar (Lior Ashkenazi) pompously smiling as though it’s all a game. The only real emotional gravitas not fabricated to the nth degree by a manipulative score and bombastic sound design comes from Meir’s legitimate sorrow whenever she catches her secretary’s tears or amends the number of dead soldiers in her journal. Those moments, however, are mostly a testament to Mirren’s performance. The scenes themselves are mostly hollowly built to tug heartstrings regardless of narrative impact.

Nattiv does manage to sneak some flair in, though. A sensory nightmare of ringing phones and explosions is well orchestrated and dead bird imagery at the end proves hard to forget. It’s just a shame the rest is so by-the-books otherwise. In many regards the whole feels like an intentional acting showcase giving Mirren the spotlight despite how doing so is sometimes at the detriment of the film. I found myself watching her more than Meir as things become less about what Golda will do to weaponize her political acumen against egotistical men of war than it is how Mirren will bring it to life.

Golda isn’t therefore a bad film. It’s simply a forgettable one, save its central performance (although even that shouldn’t make much of an impact during awards season).