It only took Hollywood decades to figure out that 90-something June Squibb could easily hold her own as a lead. After landing a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Nebraska (2013), it still took another decade for her to get her first starring role in last year’s delightful comedy Thelma. She exudes the kindly aura of a sweet elder who has just enough of a gleam in her eye to be spicy and unpredictable. Now Scarlett Johansson, in her feature directorial debut, wisely puts Squibb front and center in this sweet, funny, and moving story about grief.
Eleanor the Great introduces us to 94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein (Squibb) whose life is turned upside down when she loses her lifelong best friend and longtime roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar). Eleanor’s daughter moves her mom back to Manhattan where she can keep an eye on her but with her loss of independence, Eleanor is bored and lonely once she is there.
Pushed by her daughter to visit the Jewish Community Center to meet people, Eleanor accidentally gets pulled into a support group meeting. She is quite delighted to see the group’s kind and open faces welcoming her to find a seat. But she is alarmed to discover too late that it is a support group for Holocaust survivors. Rather than slink out of the meeting (the others encourage her to stay, thinking she just can’t face talking about her past) she starts channeling Bessie’s story of survival. Her dear friend’s raw and urgent tale is stuck in her memory, but she realizes naively too late that the story has come across as her own. Oops.
A young visitor to the session, a college student named Nina (Erin Kellyman), is unsurprisingly rapt by the chilling account that Eleanor shared. Nina wants to feature Eleanor and her story for a paper she is writing for a journalism class. But each time Eleanor hems and haws, she ends up easily swayed to continue the ruse, perhaps weighing the delight of this sweet new friendship against the faux pas of, you know, pretending someone else’s tragic past is your own. Isn’t it more important that Bessie’s stories don’t disappear?
Now, I’ve heard many stories of people masquerading as someone they’re not… for attention, sympathy, money, or fame. And “remembering” someone else’s first-person trauma is inarguably icky. But Eleanor doesn’t have a mean bone in her body—despite knowing the deeper the ruse gets, the harder it will be to recover from the lie without consequences. But when an elder (especially someone as darling as Eleanor) has nothing to gain except, well, friends and human connection, it’s hard to vilify her.
Eleanor the Great is completely carried by the always-charming Squibb who somehow never comes across as an opportunist in her extremely questionable predicament. Yes, people’s trust and sympathy will inevitably be hurt by it (the screenplay squishily tries to tie her lie to a bigger moral statement about modern Americans being unable to deal with grief and loss), but it is impossible not to be moved by both Bessie and Eleanor’s stories.
There are a couple knockout monologues in the final act of the film. Chiwetel Ejiofor is somewhat wasted as Nina’s journalist father, an emotionally shut-down recent widower who sees Eleanor as a public interest story vs a human struggling with her own grief. But he brings his all to an otherwise kind of silly newscast summing up Eleanor’s story—being the pro he is, makes you cry in spite of it all. As she should, Rita Zohar’s Bessie gets the last word in her story. Eleanor flashes back to when her dear friend woke up from a nightmare of 70 years. Eleanor sits up with Bessie to support her by simply… listening. It’s a gentle final message—a message that we certainly need to hear these days.
