When 94-year-old Eleanor’s (June Squibb) best friend of 70 years and roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) passes away, she decides it’s time for a change, and moves back to her native New York. In an attempt to get her out of the house and socialising, her daughter Lisa encourages Eleanor to attend classes at their local Jewish Community Centre, where she accidentally sits in on a group for Holocaust survivors. When they ask her to share her story, Eleanor (who is not a Holocaust survivor) panics, and recounts Polish-born Bessie’s story instead. She’s approached by journalism student Nina (Erin Kelliman), who wants to profile her for a class project: chaos ensues.
The problem with the premise of Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, is that the story can ultimately only end one way. From the second Eleanor tells her lie we know that she’s going to get found out (because this is a gentle comedy drama) and so it’s down to Tory Kamen’s script to provide enough entertainment that the journey to this inevitable destination that it doesn’t feel like a slog. Unfortunately the writing in Eleanor the Great is less than stellar, with character painted in broad strokes (Eleanor’s disinterested daughter and grandson; Nina’s workaholic father) and precious little done to breathe new life into the fish-out-of-water narrative.
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The reliably charming June Squibb does her best, but Eleanor isn’t a very interesting character, partially because we don’t really learn much about her beyond her grief regarding her friend Bessie’s death. Similarly, Kelliman does her best to inject personality into Nina, but there’s very little to hold our interest, and Johansson doesn’t prove herself a particularly talented director of performances. In fact, as the film goes on, it feels like Eleanor has less and less personality, hollowed out from the snarky, spiky old biddy we meet at the beginning of the film.
Similarly disappointing is the look and feel of Eleanor the Great, which isn’t for a lack of talent. Alice Rohrwacher and Claire Denis’ regular DoP Hélène Louvart shot the film, but it has all the personality of a New York tourism board advert, and Dustin O’Halloran’s score is similarly devoid of personality. The images within the film are too general and familiar – there is nothing new about what Johansson is attempting in her directorial debut, which leads one to wonder why she bothered making it at all. It’s not a disastrous film – in fact, it’s quite inoffensive. But this glaring niceness reflects a crucial lack of ambition, and that seems more egregious than taking a big swing. In a Cannes year that also brought us directorial debuts from Kristen Stewart and Harris Dickinson, it’s safe to say that Johansson, while the most experienced actor of the group, achieves the least with her leap to filmmaking.