Worth: $15.50
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Cast:
Helen Mirren, Live Schreiber, Camille Cottin
Intro:
The film taken as a whole is both intense and tense. Mirren’s performance is worth the price of the ticket on its own.
When just your first name has become synonymous with a particular country and era, you know you have made your mark on history. Israeli prime minister Golda Meir certainly qualifies. A leader of the leftist party in Israel, at the time she was the first woman to hold that office. Originally from Ukraine, she had been involved in the founding of the Jewish state back in the 1940s and was elected PM in 1969. She was at home talking to Generals and she could be decisive in grave situations. Not all her decisions are perfect, but history can be a harsh judge.
Director Guy Nattiv’s tightly-focused drama deals only with the period in the early 1970s, which saw Egypt and Syria attack Israel around the time of Yom Kippur. We follow the course of that brief and intense series of battles (now known as the Yom Kippur War). Israel eventually forced the other parties to surrender (with the help of American arms supplies, of course), but there were other costs. It could be said that it is linked to the oil crisis/global recession that followed. Meir herself is regarded as a divisive figure in Israel and her government was replaced by a right wing one shortly after the war.
If all this seems like a bit of a history lesson, then the director also feels the need to orientate/inform us. He begins the film with a detailed series of captions/explanations, which set the scene and in themselves privilege an Israeli perspective.
The film itself is mostly darkly lit and not a little grim. Battle scenes themselves are done via reported speech or newsreel footage, and the audience us offered scene after scene of Meir in war room mode. Individual characters are mentioned – Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger) for example – but they are there to highlight the centrality of Meir’s role. As noted, she needs the Americans, so she has to spar with Henry Kissinger, himself presiding over the, er, watery end of the Nixon era. There is a shrewd but largely sympathetic portrayal of the alleged war criminal from Liev Schreiber. Mirren and Schreiber are good together and they provide some of the best scenes.
The thing that people will really notice about this film is Mirren in the role. She gives an astonishing performance. Even if you are too young to recall Meir (and Mirren’s make up/likeness is flawless here), you get a good sense of her as a person, as well as a leader. She is far from being a little Jewish granny, but her ‘human side’ is part of the portrayal too. For example, we see her keeping a note of all the Israeli casualties that are reported to her. As one might expect, the enemy casualties, and the Arab perspective does not feature prominently.
It is all about Golda, who is in every scene. She is also undergoing treatment for cancer at the time, which adds another layer of drama. Not that it stops her from smoking. It is hard to tell if this is exaggerated, but in this portrayal, she is the chain smoker to end all chains smokers. She even lights up on the gurney before going in for a hospital scan. At that point, it becomes a little unintentionally comic.
The film is both intense and tense. As implied, Mirren’s performance is worth the price of the ticket on its own.
However, there is one ‘elephant on the room’ here too. It is almost impossible to see this film at this specific historical conjuncture and not have in the back of one’s mind what is happening in the Middle East at this very moment.
The film will live on, of course, and it won’t always be coloured by current events. Still, to release a film now that largely celebrates Israel’s militarism (whether forced on them or otherwise) is, to put it mildly, not great timing.
