Most Americans have a vague idea about who Golda Meir was, much in the same way they have a vague idea about Babe Ruth or Charlie Chaplin: They probably can call up in their mind's eye an image of the Israeli premier, even if they can't say much about her life and career. She is the stooped, beetle-browed, chain-smoking and straight-talking Iron Lady of Israel, the grandmother who became the fledgling nation's fourth prime minister.
So?
Guy Nattiv's "Golda" is one of those bio-pics that focuses on a particularly fraught period in Meir's life, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which was both her worst political and finest personal moment.
But to get to that we must first address the prosthetics that transform Helen Mirren (forever frozen in my imagination as Georgina Spica, her role in Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover") into a reasonable facsimile of the Meir we remember. As with most prosthetic-heavy performances, it takes a moment to adjust. But, like a Shakespearean iambic pentameter, stick with it a few minutes and you'll stop noticing it.
Mirren seems to get it right ... right down to Meir's American accent.
While there's something of Meir's mien that puts one in mind of an Old World baboushka, her sensibilities were forged in America.
Born in Ukraine in 1898, she came to Milwaukee with her family when she was 8 years old to escape the pogroms and lived there until her early 20s when she and her husband, under the influence of her pro-Zionist older sister, moved to a socialist settlement in Colorado.
In 1921, the couple moved to a kibbutz in Palestine where she endured cramped communal housing, outdoor plumbing, food shortages, unemployment and the constant threat of violence. (The Netflix soap opera "The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem" might provide context for the lives of Jews living in the pre-Israel Middle East.)
Instinctively strategic, Meir soon became a political insider, present at the founding of the nation -- with a reputation for pragmatism and toughness which led David Ben-Gurion to call her "the only man in my cabinet." (In that pre-"Barbie" world, Ben-Gurion meant that as the highest praise.)
Nattiv focuses on a moment when either Meir's instincts failed her or she them -- in any case, she was surprised when Egyptian and Syrian forces invaded Israel in October 1973. For once, she was rocked back on her heels, and her political vulnerability (the war was a leading factor in her resigning as prime minister in 1974) was exacerbated by a health crisis that itself was exacerbated by a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit.
"You make my job harder," the doctor who's treating her for lymphatic cancer tells her.
"As you do mine," Golda replies. Then she takes a drag on her heater.
Mirren plays the internal conflict beautifully; her Golda is funny and aphoristic. "All political careers end in failure," she warns Ariel Sharon (Ohad Knoller), who shows up as a political adversary hoping to capitalize on her failure. In a midnight phone call to Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber) she drily observes, "We've got trouble with the neighbors again."
She is capable of being shattered by the loss of a soldier yet at the same time determined to ferociously defend her young nation. People die in wars, and she is determined to coldly prosecute the one in which she finds herself. And while the script may be a little too TV-movie "and then this happened" for some tastes, Mirren is such a wonderful actor that Golda's humanity cuts through all the layers of makeup.
Meir is, like most historical figures once you begin to examine them, a somewhat problematic figure, an ally of Nixon and Kissinger who disdained Second Wave feminism and thought hippies were dirty and smelled bad.
She would have scorned those who object to Mirren's casting simply because she is neither Israeli nor Jewish. Mirren gets the job done, which is the important thing. She blasts away the old caricature of the grandmotherly, somehow doddering Meir without ever indulging in over-the-top actorliness.
Maybe she should play Babe Ruth next.
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None86 Cast: Helen Mirren, Liev Schreiber, Camille Cottin, Ellie Piercy, Rami Heuberger, Lior Ashkenazi, Rotem Keinan, Dvir Benedek, Dominic Mafham, Ed Stoppard
Director: Guy Nattiv
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Playing theatrically