June Squibb has become the female Alan Arkin. She’s 95 years old, but onscreen she delivers her zingers with the crack timing of an old person whose perception of the world is ageless in its bombs-away, truth-telling joy. After years as a sneaky scene stealer, Squibb became a star in “Nebraska,” the 2013 Alexander Payne film that turned her combination of homespun grandmotherly demeanor and ruthless wit into a crowd-pleasing force. Last year, she had her first leading role (in “Thelma,” an action comedy!), and now her perky moon face is front and center again in “Eleanor the Great,” the first film directed by Scarlett Johansson.
The movie is an awards-season wannabe in every sense. It totally plays up Squibb’s tart-tongued Arkin-adjacent antique brash aplomb. But in addition, it’s an attempt to tap into the poignant underside of a character who uses her wisecracks as weapons. Did I mention that it’s also a sentimental Holocaust weeper?
When we first meet Squibb’s Eleanor Morgenstein, who is 94 and still spry, she’s waking up in the bedroom she shares with her oldest friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar), in an apartment in Florida. It’s Friday morning, and they’re undertaking their ritual weekly outing: a trip to the supermarket. That may not sound too dramatic, but there’s rarely a dull moment with Eleanor, who will give anyone a piece of her mind, even when it’s not a friendly piece. When she and Bessie arrive at the market’s pickle-jar section, only to learn that the kosher brand they favor isn’t there, Eleanor seizes the chance to dress down a stockboy who’s utterly at sea about how to help them. That she has the awareness to skewer him as a clueless Zoomer is what’s funny — that, and the fact that Squibb delivers her lines as if they were the opening monologue of her own talk show.
The script of “Eleanor the Great,” by Tory Kamen, doesn’t stint on the sitcom sarcasm, and that’s both a plus and a minus. There’s no denying that as a character, Eleanor plays, giving Squibb an opportunity to strut her granny-with-an-attitude stuff. But you’re always aware that the movie is trying to squeeze a laugh out of you.
Bessie is a Holocaust survivor, with one of those old-world Eastern European accents and a woe-is-me shrug of a personality to match. She and Eleanor are presented as if they were two peas in a Jewish-retirement-community pod. But this gives us pause. June Squibb is a hell of an actor, but in “Eleanor the Great” she doesn’t exactly come off like a Jewish person from the Bronx (which is what the film first implies she is).
There is, however, a good explanation for that. The set-up for the movie is that Bessie, who has been Eleanor’s soulmate for decades, dies quite suddenly. Eleanor has never lived alone, so she relocates to New York City to move into the East Side apartment of her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), and grandson, Max (Will Price), at which point it starts to become clear that “Eleanor the Great” is no mere glorified sitcom. It’s an investigation into the mystery of who Eleanor is.
“You cut your hair, I see,” says Eleanor to Lisa. “I liked it better before.” That’s the kind of line that gives Eleanor — and, indeed, the comedy of June Squibb — an anti-social edge. Eleanor isn’t just sharp as a tack; she’s got boundary issues when it comes to what she thinks she can say. She talks less to communicate than to entertain herself. And it’s that what-the-hell mouthiness that gets her into trouble.
Dropped off at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center (a place where Lisa figures her mother can spend some time and make friends), she wanders into a group of people seated in a circle, and it turns out to be a support group for Holocaust survivors. A normal person would get up and leave, or maybe ask to listen. But neither of those options would satisfy Eleanor, who needs to be at the center of the action. So she starts to tell a story about how she’s from Poland, and then this happened to her, and that happened, and we realize that she’s making up who she is. She’s telling Bessie’s story and passing it off as her own. And, of course, doing a captivating job of it.
Nina (Erin Kellyman), a journalism student from NYU, is sitting in on the group to write an article for one of her classes, and she’s struck by Eleanor’s story. She wants to feature her in the article! And since Eleanor could use the company, she gets drawn into a connection with Nina — a standard buddy-movie trope. If there’s any doubt about how much “Eleanor the Great” often seems to have come out of a screenwriting processor, check out this Coincidence 101 contrivance: Back in Florida, Eleanor and Bessie were obsessed with Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a handsome cable-TV newsman — and it turns out that Roger is Nina’s recently widowed father.
The table is now set for Eleanor’s fake Holocaust story to go very public.
That someone would appropriate her best friend’s saga of wartime survival is clearly indefensible. Yet in a strange way I think “Eleanor the Great,” to be true to the outrageousness of that premise, should have sharpened the comedy of it more. Johansson, however, while she does a perfectly efficient job of directing, doesn’t hone the tone of her scenes. She keeps the whole thing earnest and rather neutral in a plot-driven way, with Squibb as her wild card. As Nina, Erin Kellyman has a wide-eyed precocity marbled with the sadness that has sprung from her mother’s death. “Eleanor the Great” very much wants to be a movie about grief. It tells us that grief is what’s at the core of Eleanor’s deception — the grief of Bessie’s passing, the grief she couldn’t bear. That’s why she did it! But guess what? I didn’t believe that for a moment. Not when June Squibb is having this good a time making herself the center of attention.
