True stories and small deceptions often live closer together than we’d like to admit. In Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson makes her directorial debut with a film that straddles that delicate line, balancing dark comedy, emotional drama, and pointed moral questions.
Come see Eleanor the Great in theatres, beginning Friday, September 26th at the Laemmle Royal, Claremont, Town Center, Glendale, NoHo, and Newhall.
The story follows Eleanor Morgenstein (brilliantly played by Academy Award nominee June Squibb), a sharp-tongued nonagenarian enjoying her Florida retirement alongside her best friend, Bessie. But when Bessie dies, Eleanor’s carefully maintained world begins to crumble. Moving north to live with her daughter and grandson, she finds herself sidelined in her own family and adrift in a city she once called home. Left at the local JCC, Eleanor accidentally wanders into a meeting of Holocaust survivors. When the group mistakes her for one of their own, she chooses not to correct them—and begins retelling Bessie’s life story as her own.
At its heart, Eleanor the Great is less about deception than about the emotional currents that carry Eleanor into it. Squibb delivers a performance of rare complexity, portraying a woman who is both caustic and vulnerable, driven by a need for connection that she cannot always admit to herself. Ultimately, it is Eleanor’s bond with Nina (Erin Kellyman), a journalism student grappling with her own grief, that becomes the film’s emotional hinge. What begins as a misunderstanding grows into a tentative friendship, each woman learning to navigate absence, longing, and the fragile ways that stories can substitute for the connections we’ve lost.
Johansson and screenwriter Tory Kamen deftly steer this relationship into morally charged territory without losing sight of the characters’ underlying humanity. The ethical questions remain thorny—Can a lie born of loneliness still hold meaning? How about connections born of a lie?—but the film resists easy answers, instead allowing its characters to stumble through contradictions much like real people do. With Hélène Louvart’s luminous cinematography giving Squibb ample space to reveal flashes of mischief, regret, and desire, Eleanor the Great becomes as much a study of performance as it is of grief.
Ultimately, Johansson’s first film as a director is both tender and unsettling. Anchored by Squibb’s distinguished performance, Eleanor the Great is less about a lie than about the longing that fuels it, and the ensuing connections that make it impossible to undo.
“Eleanor the Great may not always live up to the hyperbole of the title, but it’s still worth admiring… there’s quite a bit here that truly is pretty great.” – Jason Gorber, Collider
“June Squibb is quietly powerful and touching…” – Pete Hammond, Deadline
“Johansson’s direction is assured here, establishing the intimacy between these two older women with the kind of endearing eye usually reserved for stories about girlhood.” – Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter