I suppose this might have been a little bit more interesting if I had known more about the 'Yom Kippur" war that threatened the still quite fledgling state of Israel. With Egypt and Syria massing huge numbers of troops and tanks on the borders, it falls to the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir (Dame Helen Mirren) to galvanise her hugely outnumbered population and to work with her legendary defence minster Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger) to stave off this overwhelming force long enough for her to convince American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (an almost unrecognisable Liev Schreiber) and his boss Richard Nixon to brave the threats from the Soviets and the Saudis and come to her aid. What's annoying about this film is the astonishing lack of substance to the thing. Much effort has gone into Dame Helen's prosthetics, however much of the rest it seems to repetitively follow her walking about from place to place - with her famous white shoes - whilst lighting and smoking a cigarette. We know she is ill, and we also see from her frequent visits for treatment that the adjacent mortuary is testifying to the increasing horror of this invasion. However there's virtually no detail as to who she is/was, how she got the job, how her intelligence was attained, how her skilful combination of diplomacy and courage all helped to save her nation from annihilation. It's all just presented in a second-rate documentary style that was as unconvincing as it was shallow and episodic. Sure, it illustrates well the perils of war - but, to be honest, it could be any war where one nation was up against a larger, more powerful, one. To do justice to this story and this woman, it needed greater focus and much more detail. This is nobody's finest work here, sorry.
