Eleanor the Great
- Ben Pivoz
- Sep 23
- 3 min read
The Holocaust is an incredibly sensitive subject to tackle, one that has to be handled gently and thoughtfully, especially when the movie using it isn’t actually about it. In her directorial debut, Scarlett Johansson shows she isn’t quite up to the task. Eleanor the Great has a sweet central friendship and a few genuinely touching moments. However, its premise just doesn’t work. It causes some serious tonal shifts that hang over the movie’s themes like a massive distraction.
Once the Holocaust is introduced into the story, it takes real skill to maintain whimsy, mild amusement and reach a feel-good conclusion. It is a difficult challenge and Johansson cannot meet it. The result is confused, inconsistent and frustrating. June Squibb is a treasure as always, yet the awkward collision of tone, plot and theme is too much to overcome.
Eleanor is 94 years old, sharp as a tack and happily living with her beloved friend Bessie, a Holocaust survivor. When Bessie dies, Eleanor moves to Manhattan to live with her perpetually irritated daughter and preoccupied grandson. One day, Eleanor accidentally stumbles into a support group for Holocaust survivors. Feeling lonely and desperate for friendship, she begins telling Bessie’s story as though it was her own.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this plotline. Where Eleanor the Great (93 minutes, without the end credits) goes wrong is in trying to balance the heaviness of the material with the bittersweet charm of its protagonist’s life. It is too flimsy to combine the horrors of the past with Eleanor’s lightly comedic present. It was hard for me to be amused by one of her blunt quips when, in the previous scene, she was recounting Bessie’s tragic memories. It is a tricky juggling act that sinks the whole movie.
A credit to the filmmaking team, when Eleanor talks about the Holocaust, we don’t actually hear her talking. They flash back to Bessie telling the story to Eleanor in their apartment. The emotions would have been false otherwise, because then the scene would be about Eleanor’s deception, instead of Bessie’s pain. On the flip side, though everything stops in those moments to relate these horrors, it isn’t about them. It doesn’t seem to know what story to tell. It is not about Judaism or the Holocaust or aging. I think it settles on the difficulties of grief and allowing yourself to mourn as its theme by the end, despite the fact that it doesn’t earn those feelings enough for a convincing conclusion.
There are lovely stretches here and that is mostly due to June Squibb. The star of last year’s delightful Thelma, she plays another friendly lady who has lived too long to let herself be ignored. She is smart, stubborn, vulnerable and is afraid to admit how much she misses Bessie. Squibb is so likable that it makes it hard to be angry with Eleanor for her lie. That is really important, since sympathizing with her is key to the screenplay’s approach.
While at the support group, she meets Nina, a college student working on a project for her journalism class. Nina recently lost her mother. She is immediately fascinated by Eleanor and wants to make her the story. Eleanor rejects her at first but, in need of someone to talk to, she relents. The two become friends pretty quickly, with Nina giving Eleanor much-wanted companionship and Eleanor helping Nina accept her loss. Squibb and Erin Kellyman are good together, good enough that I occasionally forgot how incompatible their friendship is in relation to the premise.
Eleanor the Great has noble intentions. It doesn’t mean to exploit suffering for a cloying message about emotional honesty, yet it sort of inadvertently does. It has positive values and a very misguided execution. There is a solid movie in here focused on the friendship between an elderly woman and a young college student who have more in common than they would expect. Unfortunately, that isn’t this movie.
2½ out of 5
Cast:
June Squibb as Eleanor
Erin Kellyman as Nina
Chiwetel Ejiofor as Roger
Rita Zohar as Bessie
Jessica Hecht as Lisa
Directed by Scarlett Johansson
Written by Tory Kamen
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