Golda

Grade: C-

It’s a shame that Golda (the movie) is so dead in the water, because it has a few technical things going for it, and Helen Mirren – as the title character – gives one of the better biopic performances I’ve seen. I recurrently forgot it was her, and I never once clocked a drift from the American accent. She really does disappear into the role. Imagine what she could have done with a vehicle that left the runway.

Directed by Guy Nattiv, Golda depicts the life of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, particularly the 19 or 20 days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Mirren plays her at about 75 years old. Frumpy. Lymphoma-suffering. Soft-spoken. To say she chain-smokes is an understatement. She is almost never seen without a cigarette, whether it be at the hospital or seconds after being woken up by a phone call in the middle of the night. Though she was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing, and lived to see the signing of the Camp David Accords, she is portrayed as tormented and guilt-ridden by the lives she feels she could have saved had she acted sooner.

The film feels thick and heavy, like walking through pudding. Some sequences veer dangerously towards the grotesque avant-garde surreality of last year’s Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde. I felt like I was in history class as each bullet point of the plot was systematically spouted out. Aside from Mirren, the other performance I really liked was Liev Schreiber as Henry Kissinger. It’s not a slavish exact imitation; there’s just enough of the Kissinger cadence there so we know it’s him, while also allowing for personal interpretation of the character.

I mentioned that there were some technical aspects I enjoyed. The sets, lighting, and cinematography are all quite strong, and sometimes they almost succeed at telling a compelling story. I’ve never really been a cigarette smoker, but I’ve always been a sucker for well-filmed smoking in films, and Golda has tons of that. She was a chimney. However, the movie itself lives in the rote doldrums so much, that by the time any potential emotional payoffs do arise, it was too late for me to care enough to feel anything. But Mirren is so first-rate here. She’ll keep you watching.

Grade: C-