Bleecker Street
When I was a kid, I heard a lot about the various wars Israel fought from its inception, from the triumphant to the troubling, and although things often change, time tends to grant more perspective to the events of the past if we let it. Golda Meir wasn’t really someone I knew particularly well, other than an example of a female head of state way before many other Western countries had one, but otherwise she was a bit of mystery and vague legend.
But she was a real person, and declassified documents in 2021 revealed a lot more complications to her actions during the 1973 Yom Kippur War — still more documents have been declassified this year, but since this movie was filmed starting in 2021, there wasn’t much chance to include the very recent (by which I mean July of 2023) declassified material. So we take what we have.
Golda comes from director Guy Nattiv and written by Nicholas Martin and stars Helen Mirren as Golda Meir both during and immediately after the Yom Kippur War, when she was deposed for culpability of lives lost at the Agranat Commission — this little trial of sorts is the wrapper for the movie, a way to show how disliked Golda Meir was after the war ended and so many lives were lost.
The movie takes us through how the country had rumors of war even before the invasion (which was revealed in those declassified documents) but was ignored because Golda didn’t want to be the aggressor and cause problems with the US as an ally. At the same time she battles lymphoma with only her assistant Lou Kaddar (Camille Cottin) by her side, as she continues to smoke heavily.
The motif of cigarette smoke is a big deal in this movie, the obscuring of things, and the output of war and destruction — and the connection to the death of people, including Golda, who died in 1978 at the age of 80. We also have a recurring motif of birds in flight, another knowing concept from Israeli culture as we start seeing the war from behind the scenes.
The movie gets the most harrowing scenes where government officials listen to people dying, essentially helpless to do anything, as screams echo and explosions pierce eardrums. There is also some interesting back and forth with Golda and Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), an even more controversial figure, and one who is trying to protect Nixon and the US more than Israel’s interests or survival.
There is no question on the part of the film that Golda made a mistake by not striking first when she had the warning, but that history should exonerate her for making the best decision she could given the situation at the time. Because this really only takes place in the midst of the Yom Kippur War mostly through her eyes, things are really mainly just told to us — things get more personal when the film shifts to show scenes in the middle of conflict.
If you’re looking for an unbiased perspective on things, this isn’t the movie for that — but it does boast an excellent, harsh performance from Helen Mirren and a fairly decently done showcase of the hardships of war — and a reasoning for how things ended up the way they did in the future. As the movie notes, ‘Knowing when you’ve lost is easy, knowing when you’ve won is hard’ — and it’s even harder knowing if you’ll ever get close.
Note: We support the current WGA/SAG strike and emphasize the importance of writers and actors and ensuring they and fellow creatives are compensated and treated fairly for their work. This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Golda has a run time of 1 hour 40 minutes, and is rated PG-13 for thematic material and pervasive smoking.
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