Follows a 90-year-old woman trying to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.
There’s a single reason to watch “Eleanor the Great,” and her name is June Squibb.
In Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Squibb plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a 94-year-old firecracker whose irreverence and unfiltered opinions carry the weight of a woman who’s seen it all (or at least wants you to think she has).
Following the death of her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar), Eleanor upends her Florida life and heads to New York City, moving in with her uptight daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and affable grandson Max (Will Price). There, she stumbles into a support group for Holocaust survivors and promptly claims Bessie’s life story as her own.
It’s an outrageous premise, ripe with both dramatic and comedic potential. Unfortunately, the film rarely rises to meet either.
What could have been a sharply observed character study instead feels awkwardly staged and tonally inconsistent. Tory Kamen’s script flirts with weighty themes like grief, identity, memory, and legacy, but handles them with such a featherlight touch that they often float away entirely. The central deception is neither believable nor emotionally grounded, making the eventual unraveling feel more like a plot point than a genuine moral reckoning.
And yet, Squibb is magnetic. She gives Eleanor a mischievous charm and defiant vulnerability, taking a rare leading role to an actress of her age and making the most of it. Her scenes with Erin Kellyman’s earnest journalism student Nina are among the film’s few emotional high points as the two navigate a friendship built on shaky foundations. But even Squibb’s talent can’t overcome the clumsy pacing and undercooked storytelling that plagues the rest of the film.
For a supposed comedy, the film is surprisingly short on laughs. The dialogue tries for quirky but too often lands on stilted. Johansson’s direction, while competent, lacks a distinctive voice. The tone wobbles uneasily between broad humor and sentimental drama, and the result is a film that never quite figures out what it wants to be.
It’s a shame, really, because “Eleanor the Great” had the potential to be a fresh, funny, and meaningful showcase for an underrepresented demographic. Instead, it’s a scattered, strange little film with one truly great performance trapped in a muddled story.
