I read a review somewhere that Mirren can play many roles, but Israel's Golda Meir is not one of them. Bullshit.

Mirren is the gem of the movie. If you disconnect yourself from the history lesson angle and embrace the movie as a portrait of one of the strongest world leaders (say what you will, but she was the leader of a country during one of its worst wars), I think you'd appreciate how both women - the actress and the woman - mesh well together. It's the cast around Mirren (Heuberger specifically, as well as a couple of others) that don't rise to the occasion as I felt they should.

As an Israeli with an uncle who is a Yom Kippur war veteran and his big sister as my mother who lived through this war, I can tell you the movie doesn't stray much from facts. The yellings of the troops, the news blurbs, and even the curtain at Golda's apartment (my grandma had these) are real. Lots of details and effort were put into the movie to make sure it's as close to reality as possible.

I came out of the movie asking myself, who's this movie for? It's too real and too Israeli for the majority of the American public to relate to. It's too American and "Holywood" for Israelis to take it seriously. Perhaps the Jewish-American audience, who's looking for heroism from a passing era. Sad, but true. Golda is a p