Golda is not really a biopic; it keeps a tight focus on the Yom Kippur War, tracking the high-level decision-making day by day. The film uses a government hearing Meir was subjected to the following year as a frame for understanding why she made or failed to make certain strategic calls. The Agranat Commission hearing is a narrative device not unlike the one Christopher Nolan uses in the far more interesting Oppenheimer, but whereas Nolan is trying to show how the creator of the atomic bomb was subsequently brought down by his enemies in government, the stakes for Meir turn out to be considerably lower. Between the war and the cancer, the hearing is just a minor nuisance.
Of all the Israeli wars one might revisit in this format, 1973 could be the most dramatically rich choice. If 1948 and 1967 were unambiguous triumphs for Israel, 1973 was at best a draw, and could plausibly be spun as an Egyptian victory. This earned Egyptian President Anwar Sadat the domestic political capital he needed to spend in order to recognize the Jewish state and sign a formal peace treaty at Camp David five years later, which Meir would live just long enough to see. Israel’s political leadership was sufficiently shaken by the joint Egyptian and Syrian attacks on the holiest day of the Jewish year that Meir’s legacy remains controversial in Israel decades later; the decision by Meir and her military advisers not to strike first may have increased the Israeli death toll by hundreds. The Israelis faced an existential threat, and Meir turned to the United States for deliverance—and specifically to Henry Kissinger, who, in the final year of Richard Nixon’s doomed presidency, retained the global diplomatic clout to negotiate a cease-fire that both sides could respect.
To the extent Golda resists dull hagiography, it does so because Nattiv is an Israeli who clearly admires Meir but also understands that many of his countrymen are still angry at her: for failing to strike first; for green-lighting Ariel Sharon’s ill-considered push across the Suez Canal that, as she puts it, “created an army of widows and orphans”; and for then agreeing to Kissinger’s cease-fire instead of pressing ahead to Cairo, damn the consequences, as many Israeli hawks would have preferred. The film is effective at capturing Israel as a traumatized nation, in which Holocaust survivors are omnipresent and young men are eager to be heroes even when the political circumstances call for something less than heroic. Beyond being sickly and irritable, the Meir we get to know has to navigate between channeling the traumas of her electorate and making the rational choices that will best serve them. It’s an impossible balancing act, and it inevitably reveals human flaws.