There’s precisely one surprising moment in Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut “Eleanor the Great,” written by Tory Kamen. It’s the impetus for the entire drama that unfolds in this film, and it feels genuinely risky — a taboo that will be hard for this film to resolve. Yet, everything that unfolds around this moment is entirely predictable.
Also unsurprising? That star June Squibb’s warm, humorous and slightly spiky performance elevates the wobbly material and tentative direction of “Eleanor the Great.” If Johansson nails anything in her debut, it’s in allowing the 95-year-old Squibb to shine in only her second starring role (the first being last year’s action comedy “Thelma”). For any flaws or faults of “Eleanor the Great” (and there are some), Squibb still might make you cry, even if you don’t want to.
That’s the good about “Eleanor the Great,” which is a bit thin and a bit treacly, despite its high-wire premise. The record-scratch startle that jump-starts the dramatic arc occurs when Eleanor (Squibb) is trying to figure out what to do with herself at a Manhattan Jewish community center after recently relocating from Florida. Her lifelong best friend and later-in-life roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) has recently passed, and so Eleanor has moved in with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) in New York City.
Harried Lisa sends Eleanor off to the JCC for a choir class, but the impulsive and feisty nonagenarian poo-poohs the Broadway singing and instead follows a friendly face into a support group — for Holocaust survivors, as she’s alarmed to discover. Put on the spot when they ask her to share her story of survival, Eleanor shares Bessie’s personal history of escaping a Polish concentration camp instead, with horrific details she learned from her friend over sleepless nights of tortured memories.
Eleanor’s lie could have been a small deception that played out over one afternoon, never to be spoken of again if she just ghosted the meeting, but there’s a wrinkle: an NYU student, Nina (Erin Kellyman) who wants to profile Eleanor for her journalism class. Eleanor initially makes the right choice — declining to participate — before she makes the wrong one, calling Nina and inviting her over when her own grandson doesn’t show up for Shabbat dinner. Thus begins a friendship built on a lie, and we know where this is going.
Nina and Eleanor continue their relationship beyond its journalistic originas because they’re both lonely, and in mourning, Eleanor for Bessie, and Nina for her mother, who has also recently passed. They both struggle to connect with their family, Eleanor’s terminally criticized daughter Lisa, and Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Nina’s TV anchor father, who is paralyzed with grief over the loss of his wife. And so they find an unlikely friend in each other, for lunches and bat mitzvah crashing and trips to Coney Island.
Eleanor decides to have a bat mitzvah herself, claiming she never had one due to the war (the reality is that she converted for marriage), but it feels mostly like a device for a big, dramatic explosion of revelation. It also serves the purpose of justifying Eleanor’s well-intentioned deception with lessons from the Torah.
It’s still hard to stomach her continued lying, which is perhaps why the script keeps her mostly out of the support group — where the comparison to the real survivors would be too much to bear — and in the confines of a friendship with a college student far removed from that reality. Johansson also makes the choice to flash back to Bessie’s recounting of her life story when Eleanor is speaking, almost as if she’s channeling her friend and her pain. The stated intent is to share Bessie’s story when she no longer can, and surprisingly, everyone accepts this, perhaps because Squibb, as Eleanor, is too endearing to stay mad at.
Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her as a directorial debut. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotional revelations. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enables this all to work — if it does. Kellyman is terrific opposite Squibb, but this unconventional friendship tale is the kind of slight human interest story that slips from your consciousness almost as soon as it has made its brief impression.
‘Eleanor the Great’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements, some language and suggestive references)
Running time: 1:38
How to watch: In theaters on Friday, Sept. 26.
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