Berlin Review: Helen Mirren in Guy Nattiv’s ‘Golda’
deadline.comWar is coming in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, onscreen and off. But despite the media’s best efforts to turn the casting of British, non-Jewish actor Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir into an explosive example of cultural appropriation, both Nattiv’s direction and Mirren’s performance are low-key and careful enough to rise above the controversy.
In retrospect, it does seem a little strange that no other candidate was deemed suitable, and the movie won’t do much extra business on account of Mirren’s star power, but those anticipating a tone-deaf disaster will be sorely disappointed.
Golda very much exists in the slipstream of two last-decade biopics, The Iron Lady and Darkest Hour, both humanizing studies of seemingly indomitable famous politicians.
Nattiv, however, takes a much narrower view of his subject, using Meir’s testimony at an inquest into her government’s handling of the Yom Kippur war of 1973 as a framing device for an engrossing, if rather dry, docudrama procedural.
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