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Do not deny the star power of June Squibb. Resistance is futile. You may as well fistfight the tide. Even before she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2002), the 95-year-old actor had been a go-to Everygrandma, doling out enough geriatric sass to make the Golden Girls bow down yet doing so in the most polite, Midwestern way imaginable. Give her the chance to play pathos, and Squibb can crack your stony heart in half. Give her a slightly barbed punch line, and she’ll put a Borscht Belt comic to shame. The lady is a nonagenarian killer. You know it. I know it. Scarlett Johansson definitely knows it.
Johansson would probably be the first to tell you she’s lucky to have Squibb playing the title character in her directorial debut Eleanor the Great. The luck, of course, runs both ways, as Squibb had been trying to bring screenwriter Tory Karmen’s old-fashioned dramedy — about an elderly woman who accidentally finds herself nose-deep in hot water — for years before Johansson signed on. You can see why the Lost in Translation star was tempted into stepping behind the camera for this. It’s exactly the sort of modest, character-driven, just-north-of-indie movie she made her bones in as an actor before bigger projects and Marvel paychecks came calling. Once upon a time, i.e., the Nineties, she might have chased after the role of the NYU student who takes an interest in Eleanor’s story. Now the A-lister is in a position where she can return to her roots and give, say, a national treasure in her mid-nineties the chance to strut and fret her way through Manhattan. A win-win situation, in other words.
About Eleanor Morgenstein’s “story” — it’s not exactly her story, per se. To wit: She lived with her lifelong best friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar), in Florida. A mutual daily routine has been honed over decades. The duo shared everything, from their deepest secrets to their favorite bench facing the beach, where they’d sit most every morning. Then Bessie collapsed during a trip to the grocery store, ended up in the hospital, and we cut to Eleanor on that same bench, next to an empty space where her friend once sat. It’s an obvious choice to illustrate her loss, which doesn’t mean it isn’t also effective — there are a handful of tiny grace notes like this scattered throughout. You just have to pay attention and keep your eyes peeled for them. “Show-offy” is the last word you’d use to describe the visual style or storytelling here.
So Eleanor moves in with her grown daughter (Jessica Hecht) and her grandson (Will Price) in the upper west side of New York. She accidentally stumbles into a gathering at the Jewish Community Center that turns out to be a support group for Holocaust survivors. A long time ago, Bessie talked about her family’s harrowing experience in Eastern Europe during WWII when she was a child. The memories haunted her. And suddenly, when it comes time for Eleanor to speak, she relates Bessie’s remembrances of things past as if it were own. In the lady’s defense, it is a true tale of survival. It just isn’t Eleanor’s.
Also at this meeting: Nina (Erin Kellyman), who’s sitting in for a piece she’s doing for her journalism class. She wants to write about the story. The two eventually form an intergenerational friendship that’s genuine, even if its foundation is based on a white lie, and you brace for the inevitable moment — not an if, but a when — of Eleanor getting busted. Before that, however, you get an odd mix of a buddy comedy and a biddy comedy, with the premise’s inherently darker strains and a bone-deep sense of grief being leavened by sitcom-level banter. Example: When a cab driver says he’s from Staten Island, Eleanor replies, “My condolences.” Another example: Told by her daughter that there’s an apartment complex in Bay Ridge that’s perfect for someone her age, Eleanor responds with, “Why, do they have a morgue on site?” Let a thousand rimshots bloom.
The glue holding Eleanor the Great together isn’t humor, however, so much as grief — from Eleanor, from Nina and her widower father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), both still mourning the loss of Nina’s mother, and even from Bessie herself. The way she speaks of her long-gone brother suggests a wound inside of her that’s incapable of ever being fully healed, and it’s that sense of keeping the memory of him alive that makes Eleanor’s deception come off more like a mission. “Maybe God saved me so I could share my life with you,” she tells Eleanor in flashback. And in the movie’s eyes, that central lie is still passing along Bessie’s tragedy to new sets of ears, and thus neither our hero’s best friend nor that scared young boy in Eastern Europe is ever truly forgotten. To paraphrase Joan Didion, we tell others’ stories so that they might live on.
Ideally, such an attempt to blend the sorrow and the irony of it all would tap into that fertile emotional terrain between laughter and tears that we recognize from real life. Here, the tone pings between between wocka-wocka jokey, lightly whimsical, and cringeworthy, which is far from ideal. The less enamored of Eleanor the Great you become, however, the more and more thankful you are for the presence of June the Magnificent. There’s a lot of joie de vivre she injects into even the most morose moments, and Squibb knows exactly how to use spoonfuls of sugar to help the regret, the side-eye snark, and the heartache go down. The film’s just good enough. She’s great.
