"..BEAUTIFULLY CAPTURES THE NUANCE OF THE LARGER-THAN-LIFE FIGURE.."
Mary Tyler Moore fans who only know Valerie Harper as Mary Richard's gal pal Rhoda will probably be surprised at her complete transformation into the legendary Israeli prime minister Golda Meir for Jeremy Kagan's film adaptation of William Gibson's stage play. Though helped along by excellent makeup and a rubber nose, Harper beautifully captures the nuance of the larger-than-life figure, right down to the Midwestern American twang that would poke out from her Yiddish-inflected English. Like the play, the film never questions Israel's ongoing attitude towards its Arab neighbors, but then neither did Ms. Meir.
Golda (Harper) recounts the momentous events of her extraordinary life from two different vantage points: From the balcony of her Tel Aviv home during the final months of her life, and from the smoky confines of her office five years earlier when, as prime minister of Israel, she shepherded the country she help found through its most serious crisis to date — the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In between, Meir remembers her earliest years in turn-of-the-century Ukraine, where her carpenter father had to board up their windows and doors in an effort to keep his family safe during an imminent pogrom; her childhood in Milwaukee and her adolescence in Denver, where she fell in love with Zionism and her intellectual but relatively apolitical future husband Morris Meyerson; and their emigration to Palestine at Golda's urging. Even in the years before Hitler's war against the Jews, Golda believed that the a Jewish state in Palestine would serve as a model for the redemption of the human race, and she desperately wanted to be part of that mission. Tireless in her activities on behalf of the Labor Party and the Jewish Agency, which was the quasi-Jewish government in Palestine under the British Mandate, Golda would become a world-renowned figure in 1948 when, the U.N. having decided Palestine would be partitioned into two separate states, the nascent Jewish homeland girded itself for an onslaught of Arab aggression after the British finally pulled out. To raise funds for much-needed armaments, Golda toured the U.S. and returned to Palestine with over $50 million dollars in contributions. Golda's life after the founding of Israel would be equally eventful and controversial: She would oversee an underground uranium-enrichment plant from a very different kind of balcony, and manufacture weapons she came very close to using in a dangerous game of hardball with the Nixon White House during the Yom Kippur War. Golda would prove time and again an unwavering devotion to her vision of a Jewish paradise, while never losing sight of its enormous, endless cost.
Veteran playwright Gibson (The Miracle Worker) first staged Meir's biography in 1977 as Golda, a multi-character ensemble piece starring Anne Bancroft in the title role. Unhappy with the production, Gibson rethought the piece into a one-actor show and tinkered with it for nearly two decades until Golda's Balcony finally made its debut on Broadway in October 2003 with the Tony-nominated Tovah Feldshuh in the lead. In addition to playing Meir, Feldshuh voiced all the secondary characters, and while Harper (who took over for Feldshuh for the play's national tour) sticks close to the original concept, director Jeremy Kagan goes the extra step by having Harper don various wigs, eyeglasses and costumes to better differentiate Golda from the other major players in her life (her mother, Morris, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan). It's an unnecessary distraction that, along with the overused green-screen effects, threatens to overwhelm the soul of Gibson's play. Fortunately, no amount of optical wizardry and quick-change trickery can disguise the fundamental power of Harper's performance, a revelatory turn that's transformative in every sense of the term.
~ KEN FOX, TV Guide ~
