Golda

The first shot of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Mirren) is a close-up of her lighting a cigarette. That prop that might as well be a character in Golda, Gus Nattiv’s wartime thriller of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Meir is on her way to a panel where she will defend the choices made during the war, and the cigarette represents her calculated nature, the chemical stick that feeds into her edge, that strength she presents to the men around her that motions to them that she’s not one to be fucked with. She is the “Iron Lady of Israel,” after all.

Throughout Golda, Mirren does a lot of smoking and rumination in steel grayish-blue rooms and on top of washed-out beige buildings. The color treatment is cold and biting, used to convey the dire nature of the conflict Meir had to navigate. Mirren is an actress who can usually make the most average of films somewhat compelling just by her sheer presence, but there’s something off about Golda. Mirren, caked in makeup, is unable to utilize much of her face.

The prosthetics plastered on her make her features stiff and unmoving, from her tough jowls to her accordion neck. There’s nothing about Mirren’s appearance that looks real: She’s a moving statue, with her eyes working overtime to translate any kind of emotion onscreen. Then, of course, there’s the fact that Mirren is not even Jewish, and when you add that into the mixture it’s hard to understand the decisions behind casting such a slender woman to play Meir. Even the cast around her feels a bit wasted and watered down – particularly Lior Ashkenazi, who has been a force in such movies as Foxtrot and Big Bad Wolves.

A gripping performance from Mirren could have salvaged a film that, for a thriller, is tremendously slow-paced. The film feels like it came out of an undergrad film program – pristine lighting, creeping pans, and perfect match edits. Yet although Golda is competently made, there’s a sterile nature to its clean filmmaking. While there are a lot of cigarettes being smoked, there’s no actual grit to the film, a quality Golda so desperately needs to generate the level of intensity for which Nattiv (director of the Oscar-nominated short "Skin") strives. It’s a chamber drama with no tension, a funnel for a history lesson. There’s no claustrophobia, and an even lesser sense of urgency, which is astounding given the incredibly short timeline of the Yom Kippur War – lasting only 18 days from first offensive by the Arab coalition to the cease-fire.

Golda isn’t a failure of skill, but one of vision. Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin deliver a biopic that feels like a complete misfire. Stale and without any sense of self, Golda unfortunately does nothing for Israel’s only female prime minister.

OOPS: in a previous version of this review, Golda Meir's name was misspelled. We apologize for the error.