Final Rating: 2/5
Known for her prolific acting career, Scarlett Johansson tries her hand at directing with Eleanor the Great. However, despite decent performances and technically competent filmmaking, Eleanor relies too much on a bizarre screenplay from Tory Kaplan. Eleanor attempts to depict a unique approach to grieving, but lands on a portrayal too dubious for the film’s feel-good framing.
After moving back to New York, 94-year-old Eleanor, played by June Squibb, sits in on a Holocaust survivor support group by accident after mistaking it for a Broadway singing class. Rather than acknowledge her mistake, Eleanor pretends to be an Auschwitz survivor, relaying stories she’d heard from her friend Bessie (Rita Zohar), who has recently died. Eleanor’s history is compelling, and before the end of the first meeting, she is approached by Nina (Erin Kellyman), an NYU journalism student insistent on writing a story about her.
From the outset at a support group, to a great final monologue, Eleanor’s core idea is that openness and communication is an important step to overcoming grief. When Nina meets Eleanor, her mother has just died and the pain from that loss is causing her to retreat into herself. Nina’s new 94-year-old friend gives her an outlet to talk about it. Eleanor, too, is grieving the loss of her friend Bessy, and keeps her memory alive through relaying her survivor story.
What role the truth plays in that grieving process is a bit more nebulous. Eleanor’s companionship encourages Nina to be honest with herself and her new friend. Eleanor, on the other hand, builds an entire persona around a lie. Or rather, a truth that is not hers. While her character arc eventually leads her to more open and honest behaviour, her co-opting of Bessie’s life is barely condemned at all. It’s shown as transparently bad that Eleanor pretended to be a Holocaust survivor, but when she’s inevitably found out, other characters are more than satisfied with her admission that “it wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t my story.”
Eleanor is reminiscent of Dear Evan Hansen, the 2017 musical about a high school boy who fabricates letters in order to pretend a recently deceased student was his best friend. At the end of that story, Evan Hansen has to reckon with the fact that his lie spinning out of control has led to more pain than the momentary comfort he was able to provide a grieving family. There’s some debate whether Hansen’s actions in that play are condemned as strongly as they should be, but ultimately Hansen doesn’t look great at the end of the story.
Eleanor’s premise is similar, but lands far more sympathetically towards its protagonist. While characters go out of their way to point out that they “don’t condone what she did,” those around Eleanor largely come together to agree that she’s a good person and thank her for sharing Bessie’s story.
Bessie, of course, dies at the start of the film, and never has any say in what happens to her story.
Zohar is phenomenal as Bessie. Her tragic story of losing her brother while escaping from Nazis is heartbreaking, and Johansson makes the wise decision to let Bessie tell it to Eleanor in flashbacks rather than making the audience sit through Eleanor recounting it to her support group. Though she’s only in small sections, Zohar steals every scene she’s in.
As Bessie makes clear in her conversations with Eleanor how painful that story is for her, she also repeatedly emphasizes that it’s a story she hasn’t told anyone. While this ties in with the film’s message of talking about tragedies while you have the chance, Bessie, importantly, misses that chance.
Overall, Johansson doesn’t seem concerned about resolving this moral dilemma. Bessie’s exploitation at Eleanor’s hands is left unaddressed. On the surface, Eleanor the Great is nice enough. It’s pleasant to look at, Squibb is fun as the lead, and Dustin O’Halloran’s jazzy piano score keeps things moving. But digging just a bit deeper reveals a film that fails to untangle the moral conundrum at its heart.
Thank you to Sony Pictures Classics for the screener.
