Eleanor the Great – first-look review

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. 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.

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