I’m not here to spoil but to elevate Eleanor the Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson and written by first-produced screenwriter Tory Kamen, to the heights where it belongs. First, the trailer:
I believe the 90-something delightful June Squibb (Nebraska, Thelma) is worth seeing in anything—just one of the reasons I highly recommend Eleanor the Great, the second recent film in which she’s the lead.
Some call Eleanor the Great a comedy because of Eleanor’s wit, but I agree with Kate Erbland, Indiewire: it’s an “emotional dramedy.”
An introduction to Eleanor and the plot by Lindsey Bahr, APNews: “At 94-years-old, she has moved from Florida to New York after the death of her best friend and roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar). Her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), and grandson, Max (Will Price), have taken her into their small Manhattan apartment, but they only seem interested in getting Eleanor into an assisted living arrangement. Lisa especially treats her mother’s presence like an inconvenience, a problem to fix, and Eleanor starts looking elsewhere for companionship.”
In all fairness to Lisa, not only is her mom needlessly critical of her but such an undertaking can be really difficult for any busy single mom who hasn’t been used to having a deeply grieving elderly parent to caretake.
When Eleanor meets young journalism student Nina (a winning Erin Kellyman) who’s interested in the tragedy of Eleanor’s alleged life experience they develop a bond. Erbland: “Both Eleanor and Nina are defined (and confined) by the worst thing that’s ever happened to them: well, Nina by the worst thing that’s ever happened to her (the still-fresh death of her mother), and Eleanor by the worst thing that’s ever happened to the person she loves most in the world (and, arguably, to the entire world itself).” (Surviving the Holocaust, if you didn’t watch the trailer.)
Ed Potton, The Times: “Introducing this world premiere, Johansson said it was a film about ‘friendship, grief, forgiveness — all things we need more of these days.’ She didn’t mention that it also has a lick of Fight Club. Like Edward Norton’s character in that film, Eleanor is a support-group fraud, attending a group of Holocaust survivors even though she was born in Iowa. She is Jewish, having converted on marrying her husband, but the closest she has got to the Shoah is listening to the stories of Bessie, whose family were sent to Auschwitz. It’s those stories she repeats to the dumbstruck group members, played by real Holocaust survivors.”
Several intermittent and brief flashbacks feature Bessie revealing the actual memories to caring listener Eleanor.
It’s a huge comeuppance for Eleanor when her lie, one that has gotten way out of control, is discovered. And for Nina, who’d been feeling some needed support and connection in the absence of same from her also-grieving father, a famous TV journalist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), life spins totally out of whack.
Selected Reviews of Eleanor the Great
Kristy Puchko, Mashable: Squibb “brings her wonderful moxie to the title role, delivering a performance that is side-splittingly funny and tear-jerkingly poignant.”
Ed Potton, The Times: “…jackpot combination of being tear-inducing and laugh-out-loud funny.”
Kristen Lopez, The Film Maven: “For screenwriter Tory Kamen, the movie is about grieving through communication. How the stories we tell about those we’ve loved and lost help keep them alive for us. If we don’t talk about them, did they ever really exist?”
