"HARPER’S MEIR A DRIVING FORCE"
So remarkable a woman was Israeli prime minister Golda Meir that Valerie Harper found in portraying Meir a challenge to her resources that would take her to new creative heights. Harper becomes Meir – and all the other people in this film of the acclaimed one-woman play, adapted to the screen by its writer, William Gibson.
It is a splendid adaptation, with director Jeremy Paul Kagan creating a stunning, stylized background panorama incorporating archival footage and photos to evoke Meir's incredibly dynamic life that took her from a Kiev ghetto to a Milwaukee childhood to Palestine in 1921, where she would play an increasingly major role in the birth and survival of Israel.
As in his memorable 1981 film of Chaim Potok's “The Chosen,” Kagan makes the Jewish experience deeply universal and richly resonant. The film is framed in the critical days of 1973 Yom Kippur war, in which Meir wonders whether her dream of making a new world will crash in a nuclear holocaust.
Harper's Meir is a plain, direct woman of immense strength and courage, capable of acknowledging that placing Israel before family exacted its price. Harper and “Golda's Balcony” generate tremendous influence and timeless meaning.
~ Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times ~
