Golda Meir served between 1969 and 1974 as Israel’s Prime Minister, was the Middle East’s first and only female head of state, and the fourth elected female head of state in the world. If ever there was a role that Rhea Perlman from “Cheers” (also married to actor Danny DeVito) was born to play, this was it.
Instead, normally formidable screen presence Helen Mirren is tasked with the impossibility of emoting through layers of inexpressive latex. Might as well put her in the bat suit. Casting in movies is everything.
The History
In “Golda,” director Guy Nattiv focuses on Meir’s leadership during the Yom Kippur War. The film is basically a flashback through the 18 days of that conflict, and Meir is introduced in 1974, as she’s being driven to an Agranat Commission hearing that’s investigating her responses to the previous October’s Arab-Israeli War.
There’s very little context presented here about the 1973 armed conflict that launched on one of Israel’s holiest days: Yom Kippur. The war was between Israel and an Arab-states coalition: Egyptian and Syrian forces attempted to take back territory lost to Israel in 1967, during the third Arab-Israeli war. The war eventually lassoed in the United States and the Soviet Union and had the two superpowers squaring off behind the scenes in a non-confrontational defense of their respective allies.
War Movies
War is one of cinema’s most fertile muses: “Platoon,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Top Gun,” “Braveheart,” “Saving Private Ryan.” The list is long, and regardless of whether the focus is on intel-gathering, war-room shot-calling, battlefield bloodbaths, or all of the above—the definitive ingredient of keeping audiences enthralled is tension, and all aspects of war storytelling provide abundant opportunities for that.
However, “Golda” fails as a war movie due to lack of a lucid, easily understandable layout of the Israeli-Arab conflict’s history. There’s no tension if there’s little clarity as to the proceedings.
The best scene regarding this is when she hosts Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), Nixon’s secretary of state, at her home. Kissinger, already stuffed to the gills with food from previous political dinners, is presented with some borscht, painstakingly cooked by Meir’s private chef. When Kissinger politely declines, Meir clubs him over the head with grandmotherly Jewish guilt-tripping: “You have to eat it, she’s a (holocaust) survivor.”
Ridiculous Amounts of Smoking
Back when smoking was in vogue, actors loved nothing more than to act and smoke at the same time. It’s the ultimate bit of business to hide the awkwardness of scenes that haven’t been fleshed out enough and lived in enough so that gestures and emotions take on a life of their own. Smoking hides physical discomfort. Not to mention one can afford to be lazy on voice-work because smoking automatically takes the voice down a couple of notes and adds a sexy rasp.
The amount of smoking in “Golda” is off the charts, enough to be comical if it wasn’t so inherently annoying. There she is, with aggressive lymphoma, puffing cigarettes while being prepped for chemotherapy. Lying in bed and smoking. Sitting before the committee and lighting up. Throwing up blood. And then smoking.
There’s a term still used to this day in Israel to describe something ugly and old-fashioned—“Golda’s shoes.” The only thing director Nattiv fixates on more than Meir’s smoking, it’s her bloated ankles and little old lady white shoes. Had more time been spent on clarifying the war, and less on the smoking and the shoes, with Rhea Perlman in the lead, “Golda” might have been a contender as a war movie.
Perlman and Meir are and were both exactly 5 feet tall, Perlman wouldn’t need prepping on how to be Jewish, and Mirren has that peculiar magic whereby the older she gets, the more glamorous she looks. I’m all for actors stretching out of their comfort zones, like Robert Downey, Jr. wearing blackface in “Tropic Thunder,” but sometimes, for more streamlined (lack of latex) and effective storytelling purposes, it’s more advantageous to cast closer to home.
Only at the film’s end, when it shows a fleeting clip of a meeting between two former political adversaries-turned-friends, Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat, and we see the how much Golda Meir embodied the true meaning and the warmth behind the Jewish term “Mensch” do we get a sense of what could have been. Rhea Perlman would have nailed the Mensch-ness of Meir.
