Across the entire history of cinema, there can’t have been many 94-year-olds who have managed to take on the leading, title roles of relatively mainstream films twice across two calendar years. Yet, with last year’s Thelma and now Eleanor the Great, that’s exactly what June Squibb has achieved. It’s a remarkable, indefatigable, and even inspiring feat that also happens to be literally the only positive aspect of note for Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, which is otherwise bland dreck of the absolute lowest order. With one of 2025’s absolute shoddiest scripts, it takes a genuinely interesting premise and executes it in the dullest, most cowardly way possible.
If you’ve only caught some of Eleanor the Great’s marketing, it might look like a pretty typical Old Lady Comedy, in which an ancient pensioner proves she still has spark left by being inappropriate and unprovokedly rude to young people in service jobs. And yes, there is some of that in Eleanor the Great, and it is insufferable, but that’s far from the whole story. Instead, first-time writer Tory Kamen’s screenplay takes a sharp turn into the bizarre as the titular Eleanor (Squibb), having recently lost her best friend of decades, moves in with her daughter in New York and accidentally attends a Holocaust survivors’ support group. Faced with an awkward situation, she tells the story of her dead friend (an actual survivor), passing it off as her own.
It’s a mad situation, one that would have lent itself well to either a more psychologically thorny or darkly funny approach (you can easily imagine Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan or Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm stumbling into a similarly cringing scenario), anything except the flimsy feelgood tone that Johansson and Kamen go for. The result is a story too odd for pure fun viewing but also not nearly insightful enough to justify tackling the Holocaust in such a manner.
Squibb does some decent work in the lead, though she’s helped very little by what’s on the page, but the supporting cast is just woeful. As Nina, a journalism student at NYU who becomes Eleanor’s young friend and confidante as she covers her story, Erin Kellyman is instantly forgettable, while Chiwetel Ejiofor continues his run of being Hollywood’s most ill-used actor with another boring waste of his talents as Nina’s news anchor dad Roger. Their father-daughter subplot – revolving around their shared grief at the recent death of Nina’s mother – is an already bad film at its absolute worst, full of astonishingly generic dialogue scenes that all culminate in a simply embarrassing finale.
Johansson’s direction, meanwhile, barely makes an impression, and though there is some honour in a major actor choosing to remain entirely behind the camera when they direct, Eleanor the Great could have actually really used her star power to bring just some spark to proceedings. Instead, we have a film that is lifeless *at best* and more often just exasperating, every conversation and plot move feeling completely contrived, taking what should have been a tricky, provocative idea and turning it into pure pablum.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 