“We should grant people who are grieving a tremendous amount of grace” is a principle I believe in. The new film, Eleanor the Great, is dedicated to pushing that principle to its breaking point, and ultimately way past it. I’ve heard the Cannes-debuting film, which is Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, described as an earnest tribute to the importance of telling survivors’ stories, and even contrasted positively with various Hollywood figures who have said critical things about Israel. If that’s this film’s goal, it goes about it in the most roundabout, inexplicable way.
The premise of the film, written by Tory Kamen, is this: Eleanor (94-year-old actress June Squibb) lives in Florida with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). Bessie’s a Holocaust survivor, while Eleanor—a native of the Midwest who converted to Judaism as an adult—isn’t.
After Bessie dies, Eleanor returns to New York City to live with her daughter (Jessica Hecht, Ross’ ex-wife on Friends). Desperate for friends, Eleanor heads to the local JCC, where she’s accidentally ushered into a support group for Holocaust survivors. And for some reason, she decides to pass off her late friend’s Holocaust stories as her own. It’s what Roger Ebert used to call an idiot plot—if a character merely said the right thing at the right time, or copped to the misunderstanding, the plot would resolve itself within five minutes and the movie would be over.
But Eleanor the Great turns into the plot of Dear Evan Hansen, as the lie continues to spiral and results in media coverage. Eleanor soon befriends a college journalism student (Erin Kellyman), grieving the recent passing of her own Jewish mother. The student’s also the daughter of a famous local news anchor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who hasn’t begun to process his wife’s death.
This is meant to be heartwarming, and to some degree, it is. But making that premise of the film causes it to go out on a limb, and it overwhelms the story it’s trying to tell. That’s because lying about being a Holocaust survivor is a really bad thing to do People who have done it in real life, whether for literary riches or attention, have been shunned by society, and for good reason. And the film has a huge hole, in that, in contributing to a school journalism project that’s entirely fabricated, Eleanor’s exposing her college student friend to possible charges of academic fraud (or a failing grade).
Movies love to have an older character be a jerk, or do a terrible thing, and then earn redemption, but Eleanor the Great doesn’t come close. And that’s despite strong work from Squibb, who’s given more outstanding performances after the age of 80 than most actors and actresses do in their whole lives.
The scenes in which Bessie (Israeli actress Rita Zohar) tells her Holocaust story are among the film’s most powerful and affecting. If the goal was to tell a story of grief and survival, I wish it had been Bessie as a real survivor, coming to New York and befriending a young student, and the deception angle had been dropped altogether.