Golda’s Cloud of Smoke Yields a Profile in Courage

On Sep 2, 2023

Helen Mirren does it again. The British Meryl Streep has confirmed the stunning breadth of her dramatic range.

Among dozens of memorable roles, the 78-year-old actress has portrayed Queen Elizabeth II, Maria Altmann — the owner of painter Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (popularly called The Woman in Gold, the corresponding film’s title) — and fictional British military intelligence officer Katherine Powell in Eye in the Sky.

This summer, Mirren delivers first-rate work in Golda, a new motion picture about Israel’s fourth prime minister, Golda Meir, who served from 1969 to 1974.

At age 75, Meir reacted to a most unpleasant surprise: the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel’s enemies launched a muscular attack, just as its citizens were deep in prayer, on the Jewish calendar’s most solemn day. Israel never saw it coming, and Meir spends the film reassembling the shards of the Holy Land’s previously enviable national security.

For 19 days, Meir juggles internal cabinet tensions, diplomatic pressures, and aides who nearly shatter under pressure. Also on her radar: friendly but hard-headed engagement with the White House. President Richard Milhous Nixon was torn between affection for Israel and a realpolitik need to appease Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil producers. The last thing Nixon needed was for OPEC to jack up petroleum prices and sink the U.S. economy right in the middle of Watergate and the still-glowing embers of the Vietnam War.

Energy independence, anyone?

One of this film’s most intriguing elements is the cordial, but unsentimental, relationship between Meir and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Ph.D. (elegantly, albeit fleetingly, played by Liev Schreiber).

Meir also clandestinely wrestles with advancing cancer as well as her greatest challenge, by far: spending two minutes without a cigarette in her mouth.

I cannot recall another movie character who smokes, and smokes, and smokes, and smokes, and then smokes some more before smoking again, and again, and again, and again. Golda does not need an MPA rating. It deserves a surgeon general’s warning. After seeing this film, remember to air out your clothes.

Once it hits Amazon or Netflix, Golda will make a spectacular drinking game: Every time Golda puffs a coffin nail, chug a lug. Partiers will be bombed before the end of the opening credits.

Notwithstanding the woman-made fog bank that envelops Meir, this film is a fascinating portrait of a major world leader whose well-honed statecraft skills are severely tested as her nation dances with extinction. Egypt and Syria’s pincer movement came incredibly close to chopping the Jewish state in two — while its entire population was in a temple, no less.

(Joe Wright’s exceptional Darkest Hour — propelled by Gary Oldman’s Academy Award–winning depiction of Winston Churchill — is a perfect companion piece for Golda.)

Mirren, who can do anything, captures Meir as a tough-as-railroad-spikes politician with a soft spot for her soldiers and staff, including personal aide de camp Lou Kaddar (Camille Cottin). Mirren also embodies Meir as a normally self-confident figure who is nearly overwhelmed by a rapidly deteriorating military situation and key decisions that go totally sideways.

Some critics have complained that Golda is a war film without combat footage. This is largely true, save for a harrowing sequence in which legendary Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger) observes a tank battle from an open-air helicopter. The ferocious fighting below, which leaves him uncharacteristically shaken, telegraphed the depths of Israel’s peril at the hands of Syria’s Hafez al-Assad to its northeast and Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat to the southwest.

The military action otherwise unfolds via contemporaneous radio feeds of officers updating headquarters. Their screams are no less blood-curdling for being heard, not seen.

Rather than sterile, director Guy Nattiv and screenwriter Nicholas Martin’s unique approach invites filmgoers to consider how world leaders experience most wars — from safe distances, inside air-conditioned command centers, with cool drinks nearby and spotless bathrooms along freshly waxed hallways.

Might they direct their troops differently if they stood right beside them in the trenches?

Excellent question.

Kudos to Nattiv and Martin for asking it.

Here is another great question:

How did the Yom Kippur War conclude? For answers, go see Golda and enjoy this deep dive into the ashtray of history.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.

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