ELEANOR THE GREAT – Review by Susan Granger
Scarlett Johansson makes her feature film directing debut with Eleanor the Great, a prickly character study, starring 95 year-old June Squibb.
Squibb plays grieving Eleanor Morgenstein who suffers the devastating loss of her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar), causing her to relocate from Florida to New York City to live with her overly-stressed adult daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), and unreliable grandson, Max (Will Price).
Looking for company at the local Jewish Community Center, lonely Eleanor mistakenly wanders into a Holocaust support group, where she impulsively tells a tale that brings her a precarious level of attention that she did not expect.
That intrigues Nina (Erin Kellyman), an earnest 19 year-old N.Y.U. journalism student who pursues feisty Eleanor as an intergenerational friend/mentor, eventually forcing Eleanor to admit the truth.
Scripted by Tory Kamen, it already had June Squibb (“Nebraska,” “Thelma”) attached before it reached Johansson’s desk. “This script was so moving and it had such potential that, weirdly, I felt very certain that it was something I was capable of doing,” Johansson recalls.
Growing up in New York, Johansson was very close to her strong-willed Jewish grandmother, Dorothy Sloan, so she found it very easy to identify with that part of Eleanor’s story, evoking memories of a fabulist like Scheherazade.
On the other hand, a more experienced director might have pointed out the script’s all-too-convenient, contrived ‘coincidences’ which tend to compromise believability – like having Eleanor’s favorite newscaster (Chiwetel Ejiofor) turn out to be Nina’s father.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Eleanor the Great” is a spiky, salty 7, streaming on Prime Video.
