Eleanor the Great is a sentimental film with an audacious streak that it isn’t remotely prepared to handle. Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut makes for a great performance piece — as any actor-turned-director project should — starring a delightful 94-year-old June Squibb (Thelma) in only her second leading role, as a grieving Jewish woman caught up in a humongous lie. However, despite its thoughtful intentions, the movie makes for an incredibly strange and awkward comedy-drama, which leads to some accidental intrigue: the tension of whether it can actually balance the weight of its subject matter.
Spoiler alert: it can’t, though it’s hard not to wonder if its misguided nature might attract morbid curiosity. Johansson isn’t a bad filmmaker by any stretch; getting out of the way and letting your actors shine can be a skill unto itself! However, the story she conscripts them into is hard not to categorize alongside weird, misguided efforts like Collateral Beauty and Dear Evan Hansen, films about a mounting lies, whose dramatic ambitions are bold but blinkered, to the point of leaving you wondering how they came to exist in such specific form.
Squibb plays 90-something-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein, a retired widow who lives in Florida with her best friend of seven decades, Bessie (Rita Zohar), a Polish woman who lived through the Holocaust. They share a delightful camaraderie that involves dressing down young people for perceived slights, which seems to be the root of most of the movie’s humor. When Bessie dies, leaving a hole in Eleanor’s life and routine, the terse, quick-witted grandma moves back to New York to live with her middle-aged daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and her teenage grandson Max (Will Price), until she can find a place of her own.
When Lisa forces her back into the world, by way of a nearby Jewish Community Center, Eleanor accidentally wanders into a support group for Holocaust survivors, despite being born and raised in the Bronx. However, in a moment of snap judgement, she decides to narrate Bessie’s history as if it were her own, believing that it’s her responsibility to keep Bessie’s story alive.
We see these recollections as Eleanor does: narrated by Bessie in the past, as Zohar delivers quiet, powerful work. Squibb is intriguing in her own way in these moments — if only from a distance — as she attempts to navigate the guilt of her actions with the attention it brings her. However, this reckoning only takes the form of fleeting glances from Squibb herself; the narrative is seldom equipped to keep up with her, or explore Eleanor’s festering feelings. Instead, it remains more observational than intimate, as it moves quickly between plot points and conveniences, building to an eventual moment where her house of cards comes crumbling down.
However, the movie doesn’t really present the risk of revelation along the way. At most, it uses a passage from the Torah (the tale of Jacob and Isau) to let Eleanor believe her pure intentions should let her off the hook for misleading people, and the film doesn’t seem to be in disagreement. The vague notions of dramatic irony, and of narrative inevitability, loom in the background, in ways one has to assume and intuit, if only because a film about a lie must eventually lead to its unraveling.
Much of Eleanor’s screentime is spent opposite a young journalism student, Nina (Erin Kellyman), who prods at her for more information about her alleged suffering. Nina has her own emotional concerns, as a young woman similarly grieving the loss of her Jewish mother, and trying to trying to connect with her Jewish roots, while her news anchor father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor) remains distant and distracted. However, in an attempt to further mirror their journeys with one another, Johansson introduces a similar yearning for reconnection for Eleanor, albeit late enough into the runtime that it further distracts from the central premise.
What ought to be prominent question — the guilt and subsequent effects of Eleanor’s deception, even if told with a comedic streak — moves further into the background so the movie can center her relationship with Nina, and the cost of lying to a college sophomore who doesn’t do enough due diligence. This also has the added effect of an uncomfortable contemporary subtext that, perhaps intentionally, goes unaddressed.
Making a film in 2024 about Jewish American institutions and history may not inherently be a political act, but the specifics of Eleanor the Great end up making it at least political-adjacent. The film increasingly cordons off the suffering and feelings of real Holocaust survivors in favor of stories about two American-born women, neither of whom was raised in the faith — Eleanor is a convert; Nina wasn’t brought up religious — engaging, intentionally or otherwise, in the co-opting of real Jewish pain and suffering as a means of re-affirming their identities, a dynamic that’s been a major ongoing part of political conversations, given the events following October 7, 2023. The fact that no character makes mention or reference to an ongoing war that has, in an American context, centered these very same questions of belonging practically sets the film in an alternate reality (in its attempt to be timelines, the movie becomes incredibly of-its-era). Israel isn’t brought up explicitly, but Bessie is played by an Israeli actress and has an Israeli accent, so whether Johansson likes it or not, the specter of contemporary issues keeps poking through the edges of the frame, drawing one’s attention to the wider world the more it goes unconfronted and unacknowledged.
It certainly doesn’t help that the movie’s scattershot unveiling, and its reliance on dialogue as a primary means to express its ideas, leaves enough room for an emotional vagueness. This void is often filled by the film’s intended notion that Eleanor is a kind-hearted (if slightly impatient) person, whose use of historical atrocity ought not be a big deal to anyone except her new teenage friend. It’s also filled by the audience’s own anticipation that somehow, somewhere, Eleanor the Great might align what’s happening on screen with how viewers will no doubt perceive it — as a tale of ugliness smoothed over at every opportunity — but the movie ends up far too restrained by its crowd-pleasing-comedy machinations to be about the very ideas it introduces. It’s a swing and a miss, and a bizarre one at that.
Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.
