Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Eleanor the Great’ on Netflix, a Misguided June Squibb Dramedy Directed by Scarlett Johansson

Eleanor the Great (now on Netflix) lures us in with two selling points: One, it’s Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut. And two, it’s another more-than-welcome vehicle for June Squibb, the charismatic 96-year-old who became a star at the tender young age of 84, when she nabbed an Oscar nom for 2013’s Nebraska. Here, Squibb plays a gently surly senior who watches a compulsive fib snowball out of control, which may jeopardize her unlikely friendship with a college student played by Erin Kellyman – who ends up being the highlight of the film.

The Gist: Eleanor (Squibb) lets a few little fibs fly here and there, and while it might raise an eyebrow, you don’t think much of it. She’s 94 and kinda living her best life with her best friend and fellow widow Bessie (Rita Zohar). They sleep in the same room, get up together, eat together, walk on the beach together, grocery shop together – but they don’t die together. Bessie passes, and Eleanor ends up moving from her little slice of Florida joy to her daughter Lisa’s (Jessica Hecht) apartment in Manhattan, with college-age grandson Max (Will Price). Lisa and Max have busy lives, and Eleanor has a big hole in hers. Lisa and Eleanor quibble over a new living arrangement that the former calls “assisted living” and the latter calls “going to Guantanamo,” a battle of semantics and perspective.

Mother and daughter have a prickly relationship. Eleanor reveals to Max that Lisa’s nickname in high school was “the class mattress,” which is perhaps enough to justify sending the old lady to Guantanamo. See, Eleanor has a bit of a mischievous streak that toes the line between innocent and irascible – and that’s where the fibs come into play. Hoping to get Eleanor out of the apartment, Lisa signs her up for a class at the local community center, and when Eleanor gets there, she accidentally ends up in a support group for Holocaust survivors. The people there are so welcoming and encouraging, Eleanor’s whoops, wrong room protest quickly left-turns into a confessional, and out spills the story of her Polish family’s horrors at Auschwitz. Problem is, it’s not her story, but Bessie’s. 

What might’ve been a one-and-done fabrication soon spins out of control thanks to Nina (Kellyman), who’s working on a project for her journalism class, and wants to focus on Eleanor’s extraordinary story. Eleanor resists, until she realizes she doesn’t really have anyone to talk to, or have dinner with. She becomes friends with Nina, who’s feeling a bit lonely herself lately – her mother passed away six months ago, and her relationship with her TV-anchorman father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has been strained ever since. They go for walks, they eat pizza, Nina follows Eleanor to synagogue, where Eleanor wants to finally get her Bat Mitzvah. Thing is, Nina believes it never happened because of the war and genocide, but the truth is far more banal. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Thelma was a much stronger, more lively and entertaining Squibb vehicle pairing her with another young breakout star-on-the-rise in Fred Hechinger. 

Performance Worth Watching: A so-so screenplay with clunky dialogue doesn’t do the cast many favors, but Kellyman cuts through some of the artifice with moments of earnestness and intensity.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Squibb and Kellyman share several lovely moments together, prompting one to wonder why Eleanor the Great didn’t just focus on that instead of indulging the ol’ lie-spirals-out-of-control plot. It’s as if two mismatched lonely souls forging an unlikely connection isn’t enough for a movie, so you have to drop it into a conceptual narrative contrivance for it to carry any dramatic weight. Johansson struggles to tonally wed the sweet-friendship story with the dead-seriousness of Eleanor’s possibly unforgivable faux pas and several attempts at drawing lighthearted laughs. The script – by first-timer Tory Kamen – is defined by its cluttered, gently misguided ambition, and plays as if it was deemed too heavy, so someone tried to retrofit it as a comedy.

Which is too bad, considering the effort put forth by Squibb, Kellyman and, to a lesser degree, Hecht, who are often handcuffed by overcooked dialogue – overcooked dialogue within underbaked subject matter, which ultimately lacks the gravitas and sense of consequence that LYING ABOUT SURVIVING AUSCHWITZ demands. The film predictably builds tension as Eleanor’s bubble grows and grows and we wait for it to burst. Meanwhile, these characters deserve to be more than just puppets of a plot that, for example, dictates that they not listen to each other lest its phony constructs be undermined with something more closely resembling the way real people function. 

It’s easy to like Squibb’s willingness to be less than angelic in the role of a senior citizen navigating grief and isolation. Same goes for Kellyman’s sincerity in a more relatable, likable supporting role. The big problem here is Johansson and Kamen’s unwillingness to reckon with the weight of the real drama here. They hastily breeze through the third act, where every character gets A Moment in an inevitable Contemplation Montage before the film paints over Eleanor’s gross indiscretions with mawkish sentiments about the power of forgiveness, and how true friendship can survive seismic conflict. There’s a much stronger, memorable and resonant way to navigate Eleanor out of her conundrum, but the movie never figures it out.

Our Call: Eleanor the Great is a well-intentioned miscalculation. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.