Eleanor the Great

At 94, Eleanor Morgenstein (June Squibb) never backs down from a challenge, be it a stockboy too unconcerned to check for a product out back or a waitress who turns down her request for a straw, but when her roommate and lifelong best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar) passes away and she moves from Florida back home to New York City, a random act of kindness leads her into a lie that snowballs when she is befriended by an NYU journalism student in "Eleanor the Great."

Laura's Review: C+

Inspired by her own 95 year-old grandmother's cross country move, screenwriter Tory Kamen has woven two stories involving intense grief connected by a lie which begins somewhat innocently before spiraling into a harmful deception, but while first time director Scarlett Johansson successfully gets Kamen's ideas across, ironically she lets down some of her actors. As she proved last year as the titular "Thelma," June Squibb is a force of nature, but while she embodies the feisty, caustic Morgenstein, direction and editing take the air out of some of her performance, line readings rendered leaden rather than conversational. Erin Kellyman ("The Green Knight"), who plays Nina, the student who finds a lifeline in Eleanor, also comes off awkwardly in a couple of scenes.

Johansson economically sets her stage defining the friendship of Eleanor and Bessie, the two awakening side by side in twin beds, eating breakfast together, heading to the beach, then going grocery shopping where Bessie will collapse. A quick visit to the hospital and suddenly a shellshocked Eleanor is stripping the bed adjacent to hers. When she arrives in New York, she greets her grandson Max (Will Price) with concern and her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) with a back-handed compliment. 'She's going to live forever, isn't she?' Max remarks to his mother.

Eleanor expects Lisa to drop everything to entertain her, but as the woman works for a living, she planned a singing class at the JCC. Eleanor reluctantly heads over but stops at the class threshold cringing as one senior wraps up 'I'm Still Here.' Noticing a woman down the hall struggling with her sweater, Eleanor jumps to help and the woman, Vera (Lauren Klein), assumes she is attending her meeting. Following the friendly welcome, Eleanor sits and discovers she is in a Holocaust survivors group. Pressed for her story, Eleanor tells one of Bessie's, moving the group to tears and inspiring the young student focusing her journalism project on the group to shift her focus to Eleanor. Eleanor quickly dismisses the idea, ignoring Nina's subsequent texts, but when Max cancels on the Shabbat dinner she is preparing, Eleanor invites Nina, the two getting along so well, Eleanor invites her to synagogue as well.

As it turns out, Nina is also grief stricken, her mother having passed away recently, her father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor) processing his own by turning inward (Johansson briefly cuts to an odd scene of Nina crying in front of a series of photographs with who we assume is her mother and herself as a child to relay this information). Eleanor proves a much needed balm, telling her that one heals by talking about things (the screenplay is full of observations like this, such as Bessie telling her friend 'You're interesting enough - you don't have to lie,' or a rabbi commenting that 'deception isn't always bad if the intention is good'). But when Nina learns Eleanor goes to synagogue to crash bat mitzvahs because they weren't done for girls when she was young (and trying to survive, of course, the afterthought maintaining the lie), Nina finally gets her father's interest, the man the face of a special interest program. Conveniently, Bessie and Eleanor had both remarked on their admiration for the man back in Florida, and when Eleanor learns who Nina's father is, she agrees to dinner with the two of them which in turn leads into a climactic public reckoning.

Johansson uses Eleanor's relating of Bessie's story as opportunities to flash back to the two women when Eleanor first heard them. Wisely she ends her film with one of these scenes, Zohar incredibly moving, going out on a high point. But the film is problematic. While Squibb sells the idea of lying as a form of homage, or grief therapy, while acknowledging what she did was wrong, the film never addresses the fact that in stringing Nina along, she is endangering the young woman's career and the manner in which she is revealed to be lying is at odds with normal human behavior.

While the film's direction exhibits inexperience, Johansson took on a complex premise that invites discussion and shows promise. Director of photography Hélène Louvart ("La Chimera") and production designer Happy Massee ("The Immigrant") use interior spaces to define character and relationships. One also must admire Squibb's embrace of a character with sharp edges, her glee in throwing down a gauntlet as convincing as her love and empathy.

Robin's Review: B

After the death of her best friend, 94-year old Eleanor (June Squibb) has moved from her Florida retirement home to Manhattan and her daughter and grandson. She meets a group of Holocaust survivors and is compelled to tell them her “story.” The lie spirals away from her control in “Eleanor the Great.”

Here, we have a very senior actor with June Squibb playing her age and a first-time feature director with Scarlett Johansson joining forces to tell what becomes a complicated story about an elderly woman who just suffered a great loss.

Eleanor has been living for the past 11 years sharing a home with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar), a Holocaust survivor. One day, she collapses but both think nothing of it, until….

All alone, Eleanor takes her daughter, Lisa’s (Jessica Hecht), offer to live with her and grandson Max (Will Price) in their apartment back in her old digs in NYC. Once there, she goes to the local senior center, at Lisa’s insistence, and meets another elderly woman and invited to a group meeting.

What Eleanor does not know is the meeting is for Holocaust survivors. She gets caught up in their stories of the horror and, at one point, blurts out, “I’m from Poland!” Suddenly she commandeers her best friend’s story as her own, posing as a survivor herself. She perpetuates the story.

One of the attendees at the gathering is a young woman, Nina (Erin Kellyman), a writing student there to observe. She and Eleanor hit it off right away and the young woman is drawn to Eleanor’s “story.” This results in an invite to dinner with Nina’s father, Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a TV news producer. He is also interested in telling her story to a much wider audience. Her fabric of lies only increases in its size.

June Squibb, while an actor for some time, came to my attention in Alexander Payne’s 2013 film, “Nebraska,” earning her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She came to her present prominence and acclaim with last year’s “Thelma,” playing a tough old broad. She reprises that persona as “Eleanor the Great.”

When we first meet Eleanor, after she lost her BFF, she is overbearing, insulting and is used to getting her way – always. Fortunately, and despite the lie, she grows on you and you can forgive her because of her loss – sort of. The bond that forms between her and Nina helps to temper Eleanor’s demanding nature. All the while, the lie keeps looming larger.

Tyro helmer Johansson, with scribe Tory Kamen, tries a bit too hard her first time out and packs a lot of stories into one screenplay. There is the lie and its self-perpetuation; her newfound friendship with Nina; Nina’s insecurity with her own writing and living in the shadow of her famous father; the spiral out of control as the lie gets more and more attention; and, finally, things tie up nicely – without a lot of angst.

It is a pleasure to see a senior citizen as the lead in a movie that does not involve assisted living, at least not as the focus of the film. Instead, we get a pleasant character study of a feisty old broad who knows how to get her way. Let us hope that Squibb keeps going for a long time and, maybe, she could use the money.

Sony Pictures Classics releases "Eleanor the Great" in theaters on 9/26/25.