At 95, Oscar-nominated actress June Squibb is having quite the third-act renaissance, starring in her first leading role (Thelma) only last year. And in this year’s Eleanor The Great, Squibb, a spunky little dynamo, holds the screen as spiky widow Eleanor Morgenstein. She enjoys her weekly grocery store runs for Kosher pickles (where she gives the new teenage stock boy who doesn’t know his dills an earful) and gazing out at the beach with her best friend and roommate, Bessie Stern (Rita Zohar, an Israeli actress and childhood Holocaust survivor), near their Florida home.
Bessie and Eleanor’s bond runs deep. They both have children and grandchildren, but they’re each other’s chosen family. A Survivor, Bessie tells no one but Eleanor about the period under German occupation when she, her brother and their mother were forced to hide in a closet in a neighbor’s home until the Nazis found them. Bessie remains haunted, suffering nightmares about her brother, who was shot and killed by guards after the two jumped off a train heading to certain death. As she’s approaching her birthday, Bessie decides to share this with Eleanor because Bessie is the only one to tell her brother’s story and she wants it to be known.
Life is upended when Bessie dies, and Eleanor moves to New York to live with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) in her Manhattan apartment. A born critic who’s quick with the blunt remark, Eleanor and Lisa aren’t close (Eleanor is dismissive of Lisa’s demanding job and tells her she likes Lisa’s haircut, but it looked better longer).
I would have liked to know why Eleanor is so sharp-tongued with everyone and how she became distanced from her family, but screenwriter Tony Kamen doesn’t go too much into that part of her character.
Eleanor sees little of Lisa or her teenage grandson Max (Will Price); she dines alone in the apartment after Max cancels on coming over for Shabbat (and no doubt on other nights as well). She goes to the JCC for a singing class Lisa signed her up for but after a 10-second once over, heads for the door. As she chats on her way out with a woman in a sweater that reminds her of Bessie, Eleanor suddenly finds herself mistakenly in a class for Holocaust Survivors (Johansson chose real-life Survivors), a mistake the adrift Eleanor doesn’t correct. She assumes Bessie’s story and tells it as if it were her own.
Eleanor finds an unlikely friend in Nina (Erin Kellyman), a sweet, curious college student who wants to write about the group for her journalism class. Eleanor attempts to evade Nina’s probing questions by getting her to talk about her mother, whom Nina lost in a car accident only six months earlier. Sensing kindred spirits in the other, the two connect over their pain. Nina and her father, Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), barely speak when they’re home together, walls adorned with the photos taken by her photographer mother. As Eleanor helps Nina release some of her raw emotions, Eleanor in turn becomes a little less sharp-tongued and kinder.
Encouraged by Nina (who writes about Eleanor for her class, misled by Eleanor’s fabrications) and by the love and support from the group, Eleanor gets swept up in plans to have an adult Bat Mitzvah. Things swiftly spiral from there, not least of all because Roger, a local news anchor, reads Nina’s profile and is interested in running a story on Eleanor.
Johansson and Kamen are only so troubled by Eleanor’s transgressions. As the rabbi who assigns her the parsha (on brothers Jacob and Esau) for her Bat Mitzvah tells her, deceit can be forgivable “if the intention is pure.”
Whether the audience agrees depends on whether they’re on board with one of the main takeaways of the film: If not for this grief-illiterate culture, as well as being one that takes too little notice of older adults, the sadness and isolation wouldn’t have been so profound as to compel Eleanor to act out of desperation. Given that during the pandemic the Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic, it’s an argument not without merit. I think ultimately, that despite a too-pat conclusion and the movie dodging the thornier questions about ethics and who should get to tell Survivor stories, living and dead, Squibb’s spirited and relatable Eleanor, and the need for a feel good ending, will win out.
Eleanor The Great is in theaters now.
