June Squibb takes her second starring role in the directorial debut from Scarlett Johansson, Eleanor the Great. (Johansson works from a script by Tory Kamen.) Squibb’s signature spunky old woman energy infuses the title character, a Jewish widow from the Bronx living with her best friend Bessie in Florida. The two nonagenarians have cohabitated for eleven years, and their life is one entrenched joyful routine until Bessie’s death. After this initial event, Eleanor moves back to New York to live with her daughter in Manhattan and direct her sass at all attempts to shunt her to a retirement home.
Eleanor is an open, jovial lady who has made the best of her long life. At 94, she is still committed to this principle and actually goes to the Jewish Comunity Center when her daughter signs her up for a class she wants no part of. While ducking out of that meeting, she finds herself ushered into a neighboring room, where she begins to make friends with other Jewish women her age.
That’s when the plot drops. This is no mere social group. It’s a support group for Holocaust survivors. Eleanor is not a Holocaust survivor…but Bessie was. Without any forethought, Eleanor finds herself telling Bessie’s story as if it were her own. A keen journalism student (Erin Kellyman) and her news anchor father (Chiwetel Ejiofor) take an interest in our heroine, and soon she is bonding with the young woman over tales from Bessie’s life, told as her own.
At this point, I will stop my steady stream of spoilers. You know exactly where the story is going (which is one of the small problems with the movie). Johansson has made a completely fine cookie-cutter tale of cross-genrational friendship and grief. Squibb is good, but she has a better performance inside her that never gets tapped. I could say the same about the film itself. This is all usual first-time director stuff. In 2025, though, the world has little patience for the natural evolution of an artist or their inevitable ‘misses.’ I hope that Hollywood gives Johansson time to develop her directing skills…but that’s sadly not a given.
While the entire film is perfectly fine and not much more, my only real problem is its missed opportunities. This movie could have felt more unique and spread its wings further. What is especially sad to me personally is that the film sets up a ripe situation through which to discuss what is often dismissively called “appropriation.” Who has the right to tell another person’s story? Bessie is shattered by her life of silence and wishes she had told the world about her private terrors. Eleanor gets the chance to do that for her, posthumously. But does she have the right? Does Johansson have the right to make a film about the Jewish community? These are questions I wanted explored, but the film only brushed against them, instead focusing on personal and corporate grief.
Yes, it is clear that Eleanor should come clean about the story being her friend’s, thereby honoring Bessie to the full. But the very idea that she would dare to tell another person’s story—albeit often in their exact words—is anathema to some. And yet the story needs to be told, and there are no living participants to tell it. In my grad school, one of our visiting authors was a Chinese-Canadian woman who had written a novel about the Cambodian genocide. It was acclaimed, and yet she felt that she had no right to have written it. She told us how much she wished there were more stories of the Khmer Rouge in circulation…but she maintained that no one had the right to tell them but the dead or maybe their countrymen. (I have written a play about the same atrocity that is taken from a first-person account. I believe that I had a duty to tell that beautiful and important tale, but most people think the opposite.) Sadly, this is not the focus of Eleanor the Great. It’s a fine film, but it could have been a great one if it had been as brave as its heroine and tackled the real issues at its center. It’s a solid three-star movie (my rating for basic, good films that are worth watching). Here’s hoping that Scarlett Johansson gets a second shot at directing and finds her own voice in the process.