100 min | PG-13 | August 25, 2023 | Bleecker Street
Helen Mirren disappears under latex to play Golda Meir during the eighteen days of the Yom Kippur War. The film locks her in smoke-filled rooms and keeps the war offscreen. The makeup does more acting than the script.
Golda covers the days in October 1973 when Egyptian and Syrian forces catch Israel by surprise on Yom Kippur. Golda Meir runs the war from offices, bunkers, and hospital corridors while hiding a lymphoma diagnosis from her cabinet. The film never leaves the rooms where the decisions get made. Guy Nattiv builds the whole thing as a chamber piece about a leader absorbing catastrophe one phone call at a time. The intention is a study of command under pressure. The result is a procedural that mistakes confinement for intensity.
Helen Mirren plays Golda Meir under a thick layer of prosthetics, age makeup, and a constant cigarette. She gives the woman a low, deliberate voice and a stillness that reads as exhaustion. The performance works in silence and falters when the script asks her to explain herself. Camille Cottin plays Lou Kaddar, the aide who manages Golda’s body as much as her schedule. Liev Schreiber plays Henry Kissinger as a calculating guest who wants a ceasefire on American terms. Lior Ashkenazi as Dado Elazar and Rami Heuberger as Moshe Dayan fill the war room, but the script hands them briefings instead of characters.
Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin keep the fighting offscreen and deliver the war through sound. Battles arrive as radio chatter, casualty counts, and the voices of soldiers dying on an open channel. This is the strongest idea in the film. Golda hears the Bar-Lev Line collapse without seeing it, and the audience sits in the same helplessness. The cinematography boxes Mirren into tight frames thick with smoke and shadow. The approach generates dread early and then repeats itself until the dread goes flat.
The film treats the Yom Kippur War as a backdrop for a single performance rather than a subject in its own right. It gestures at the intelligence failures and the political cost without examining either. Golda’s guilt over the dead becomes a mood instead of an argument. Martin’s script reduces a national trauma to a tasteful history lesson with a famous face at the center. Nattiv has the craft to stage the claustrophobia but not the nerve to interrogate the politics inside it. The prosthetics commit harder than the movie does.