Eleanor the Great Is Lightweight Dramedy, Deep Fried in Schmaltz

Eleanor the Great is one of those films that feels as if it must have been sparked by a very specific prompt–“What if a senior citizen woman lied about being a Holocaust survivor?”–but then somehow subsequently progressed all the way through production and release without considering if it had reasonable answers to the obvious, attending questions its prompt raises, like “Why would someone do that?”, or “How would people react to it?” The directorial feature debut of Scarlett Johansson is aiming for weepy, awards season-baiting dramedy, taking advantage of the considerable goodwill toward the late-career renaissance of star June Squibb, but it doesn’t have the guts to really engage with the thornier issues that its provocatory prompt would seemingly imply. Does Squibb charm in the film? Sure, alongside an equally likable supporting turn from Erin Kellyman as the NYU student with whom she forges an intimate and unlikely friendship, but this warmth is also part of Eleanor the Great’s problem in its own way–we’re so busy palling around with Squibb that the film has no heart to interrogate her character in any real way. With a plot that likewise falls apart under the lightest bit of scrutiny, what we really needed was more judgement of our protagonist, and not less.

The titular Eleanor Morgenstein (Squibb) is a 94-year-old living in Florida, tenuously maintaining some semblance of an independent life thanks to her partnership with Bessie (Rita Zohar), her best friend of the last six or seven decades. Having long outlived their husbands, the two live together in a small apartment in a dyad of a support system, the unspoken implication being that this is only safe thanks to the presence of the two together: One needs to be there to help the other. And when Bessie, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor passes away, that means Eleanor (an American-born Jewish convert via marriage decades earlier) has lost her one daily constant. She needs a new place to live, even if that means uprooting and moving back to Manhattan to live with her anxious daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and grandson Max (Will Price), who not-so-subtly want to relocate her before long to an assisted living facility. Suffice to say, they’re not going to provide the companionship that Eleanor truly craves in her final remaining years, which is what leads her to the local Jewish cultural center and a simple misunderstanding that eventually spins out of control.

This is the hinge point of Eleanor the Great, and unfortunately it serves as a pretty much textbook illustration of a term that Roger Ebert helped to popularize, which is the “idiot plot.” Eleanor is, by chance and accident, invited into a support group at the community center that she doesn’t realize at first is for Holocaust survivors. But because the group seemingly offers the kind of warmth and open emotionality that she’s missing in the wake of Bessie’s passing, when her turn comes to speak she impulsively offers up Bessie’s WWII-era concentration camp story as her own. This is meant to set up the stakes of Eleanor the Great as being about deception and appropriation, in the name of nobly trying to “keep alive” the story of someone else, but it’s difficult to ask the audience to look past the fact that the film’s entire ethical quandary could be sidestepped at any time by just a few sentences of clarification. The “idiot plot” describes a narrative in which only unrealistic density of the characters can prevent the problem from being discovered, quickly addressed and solved before it grows worse; in the case of Eleanor the Great there would have been absolutely nothing wrong with its title character simply qualifying “I am not personally a Holocaust survivor, but my best friend of the last 70 years was, and I believe that she would want me to share her story with you.” Instead, Tory Kamen’s screenplay forces its way into a Dear Evan Hansen situation that was simply never necessary, nor do we get any sense of why such a choice is more attractive to Eleanor’s character than simply telling the truth. It’s insulting to ask the audience to overlook how easily pretty much all the problems presented by the screenplay could be avoided or rectified, and it also makes most of the supporting characters seem less intelligent for the fact that they’re so easily taken in by the deception, neglecting to so much as type the woman’s name into a search engine.