There’s a lovely touch Scarlett Johansson brings to Eleanor the Great, her feature film directorial debut. She knows how to be tender with her film’s subjects and their personal histories while propelling us into a Dear Evan Hansen-esque lie that spins out of control. Unlike that movie, however, it’s easier to understand why our titular character, Eleanor (June Squibb), makes the choices she does, and we do empathize with her actions. But it’s still hard to watch as a simple misunderstanding balloons to dangerous proportions.
June Squibb is a hoot as Eleanor, a 94-year-old retiree living in Florida with her roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar), a Holocaust survivor. Possessing a sarcastic yet lively personality, Eleanor looks forward to every minute spent with Bessie, whether it’s waking up to start the day, eating meals, or going to the supermarket. Through her, we recognize the need for companionship in later years, a need that is exacerbated when Bessie unexpectedly passes away. It worsens when Eleanor is forced to move in with her daughter and grandson in New York City, as neither of them has time for her due to their busy lives.
To this point, Eleanor’s friendship with Bessie has been her reason for living. Not only does Eleanor share smiles and laughter with her, but she also gives Bessie room to tell her of her troubles and her past as someone who lost her family to the Nazis and barely escaped with her own life. Rita Zohar respectfully and solemnly delivers her character’s stories with such trembling realness, you could almost swear that she was speaking from experience. (Zohar was born in a concentration camp in Romania in World War II, but screenwriter Tory Kamen writes Bessie as being older during that time.) Her performance is one that must be seen to be believed and appreciated—it’s one of the best this year.
Conversely, Squibb dives fully into the thrust/riposte vibe that Eleanor has developed over the years. Eleanor’s tough, but not completely—she knows she can come up short in certain departments. One of these shortcomings leads her into the situation she finds herself in after mistakenly being invited to and attending a Holocaust survivor’s group at her local Jewish Community Center. Instead of bowing out and saying she was there in error, she channels Bessie and tells the stories she heard when Bessie’s survivor’s guilt was keeping her up into the late night, passing them off as her own.
She’s found a new community, but this meeting has also been attended by Nina (Erin Kellyman), a college student writing about Holocaust survivors. Nina’s also dealing with the recent loss of her mother, and it doesn’t help that her too-busy-to-deal, television reporter father, Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), hasn’t helped her grieve, much less confronted it on his own. These two—Eleanor and Nina—are two lost souls searching for peace, and they begin to find it in each other, developing a close friendship while Eleanor scrambles to keep her stories straight. Not just for Nina and the survivors’ group, but with her own family, who start to wonder why she’s suddenly reinvigorated and keeping secrets from them.
Movies like this—where a well-intentioned lie grows beyond anything the fibber expected—tend to make me very uncomfortable. They always involve two or more people sharing a bond based on nothing, and the damning revelation always comes with the price of someone getting hurt. I hate seeing that kind of thing; here, though, there’s a depth to it that makes it somewhat easier to accept. Eleanor’s not doing this to be malicious; she’s doing it so Bessie’s story—and Eleanor’s memory of Bessie—doesn’t go untold or unappreciated. She’s not making Bessie someone she wasn’t, as Evan did to Connor in the aforementioned Dear Evan Hansen; she’s being exact and truthful, but it’s someone else’s truth she’s telling.
Nina is also hurting immensely, and her unlikely friendship with Eleanor—which isn’t a road Eleanor initially wants to go down because Eleanor knows full well that she’s not being truthful—starts her own healing journey. Erin Kellyman embodies the fragility of youth and the universal need for catharsis in Nina, the latter of which Eleanor doesn’t yet realize she needs. It’s a beautifully soulful performance Kellyman delivers with Nina being caught between “I don’t know if I’m ready to move on” and “I need help moving on”; it’s a terrible nether space Nina’s caught in, and Kellyman possesses both the strength and the weakness to create this precarious balance, never tipping toward the underplayed or overdramatic.
Scarlett Johansson finds the brilliance of humanity in all of her characters—even in the ancillary folks offering a few lines or two—and layers it deeply within Eleanor the Great. It’s not a schlocky or maudlin characteristic; it’s entirely natural and graceful, even in the tumultuous scenes where Eleanor must own what she’s done. Johansson ensures that we don’t view anyone as a villain, as there doesn’t need to be one. The only villain is time and its indifference in giving and taking, and Eleanor the Great finds all of its inhabitants battling against it; they may not be pulling on the same rope at first, but eventually, we see the possibility of uniting to find the sweetness amid the sorrow.
