TIFF Review: “Eleanor the Great”

Eleanor the Great (Scarlett Johansson, 2025) 2½ out of 5 stars

Eleanor the Great, actress Scarlett Johansson’s feature-directorial debut, begins with a heartwarming (and heartbreaking) image of best friends growing old together. They are Bessie (Rita Zohar, Unspoken) and Eleanor (June Squibb, Thelma), both widows who enjoy their senior years as roommates in the sunny climate of Florida, taking walks, sharing memories, and sleeping side by side in matching twin beds. This lovely idyll is shattered when Bessie dies.

Eleanor is understandably distraught, but is soon making the best of things by moving back to her longtime hometown, New York City, where her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht, Banana Split), and grandson, Max (Will Price, Brave the Dark), reside. Though we saw her be kind to Bessie, she is anything but so to Lisa, heckling her about this and that. So it is no surprise that Lisa wants her occupied, signing her mom up for music classes at the local JCC.

A detail we learn in the opening is that Bessie survived the Holocaust. Steeped in her deceased friend’s story, Eleanor takes on the identity of a survivor herself when she mistakenly walks into a support group at the JCC. Since we’ve also been shown that Eleanor is a bit of a fabulist, it hardly shocks when she just rolls with things and borrows Bessie’s narrative.

One thing leads to another, and the lie grows exponentially. Soon, a young NYU journalism student, Nina (Erin Kellyman, Blitz) decides to make Eleanor the focus of her class assignment. Bereft at the recent loss of her mother, and confused by the emotional reserve of her father, Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor, The Old Guard), a famous TV journalist, Nina sees in Eleanor a comforting maternal figure with whom to bond.

And therein lies the primary flaw in the script, by Tory Kamen. Eleanor may be in her nineties and occasionally crotchety, but this does not excuse the way she misleads Nina. Although the movie does hold her to account, it does so with a mix of tones that never quite come together in a satisfying way. There’s nothing funny about betrayal of this magnitude, nor about cosplaying a victim of the Nazis.

Johansson coaxes mostly fine performances from her cast, especially Kellyman, and her cinematographer, Hélène Louvart (La Chimera), delivers beautiful images. But Hecht is given the thankless task of playing a part where she must claim love for someone who is only nasty to her in return (which further erodes Eleanor’s appeal). And Ejiofor serves mainly to sanitize Eleanor’s reprehensible behavior.

Still, there are moments when, as a meditation on grief, Eleanor the Great succeeds more than it doesn’t. Unfortunately, the rest of the time the film falls short. It’s great seeing Squibb, born in 1929, still hard at work. She just needs better material.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.