Lisa Liebman
Vanity Fair, Aug. 25, 2023
“Whatever you end up thinking of the flawed female leader—who, as the film shows, was investigated about her prosecution of the war—Nattiv’s goal was to acknowledge the trailblazer who he says, “paved the way for Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel.”
In the new biopic Golda, the prime minister dubbed Israel’s “Iron Lady,” isn’t entirely the steely stateswoman she was purported to be. The film, which dramatizes about a dozen tumultuous days in 1973, stars Helen Mirren—with a prosthetically enhanced face and a multipiece bodysuit—as Golda Meir, the 75-year-old chain-smoking politician with no military experience who, due to inconclusive intelligence, finds herself leading a country ill-prepared for coordinated attacks by both Soviet-backed Egypt and Syria during what became known as the Yom Kippur War.
With the young country’s survival on the line, and unbeknownst to Meir’s squabbling cadre of male military advisers—or US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), from whom Israel needs fighter jets—the head of state is also waging a private battle that only her loyal aide, Lou Kaddar (Camille Cottin), knows about. As casualties mount, and hundreds of outnumbered soldiers are surrounded and taken prisoner in captured territories, a despairing Meir—who keeps count of the death toll in a little red book—is also secretly undergoing cobalt radiation treatments for lymphoma. [To read the full article, click here]
