Misguided dramedy not great

Making her directorial debut, actor Scarlett Johansson (whose movies range from Lost in Translation to The Avengers) has chosen a small human story that is enormously well-intentioned.

But as the central character in this awkward, uneven dramedy proves, good intentions can have disastrous consequences. Attempting to make a much-needed statement about our contemporary culture’s difficulty in dealing with age, grief and loneliness, Eleanor the Great misfires, sometimes badly.

There are things that work. As we often see in projects by actors-turned-directors, the film’s core strength comes from its performances, especially that of 95-year-old June Squibb, a veteran actress who has a long list of supporting work in such movies as Nebraska and About Schmidt and recently received star billing in 2024’s Thelma. Here she takes the title role of Eleanor Morgenstein, a cranky, critical but compassionate senior.

As the story opens, Eleanor is living in Florida with Bessie (Rita Zohar). After the deaths of their husbands, the two old friends have been looking after each other. When Bessie wakes from nightmares rising out of her experiences during the Holocaust — a story she has never related, even to her own family — she and Eleanor sit at the kitchen table and talk it through.

Then Bessie dies, and Eleanor returns to New York City, where she raised her family, to live with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht from Breaking Bad).

Trying to fill her mother’s time, Lisa signs Eleanor up for a Broadway song class at the nearby Jewish Community Centre. Hearing what she considers subpar Sondheim, Eleanor slips down the hall and inadvertently ends up in a Holocaust survivors’ support group.

At this point, you can still imagine a certain kind of Curb Your Enthusiasm comedy coming out of this. But then Eleanor, called upon to speak, relates the experiences of Bessie as if they were her own.

Nina (Erin Kellyman from Solo: A Star Wars Story), a young journalism student sitting in on the session, picks up the story — and then things really get out of hand.

There are techniques for dealing with difficult, delicate subject matter in ways that combine dark humour and real emotional weight. Last year’s A Real Pain pulled this off beautifully.

But rookie screenwriter Tory Kamen just keeps going deeper and deeper into this deception, which becomes excruciatingly uncomfortable in ways the script never really acknowledges.

Basically, our protagonist, in many ways so sympathetic, is pretending to be a Holocaust survivor, and while in real life this kind of thing sparks social-media outrage and gets book and film contracts cancelled, Kamen keeps trying to make it into a bumbling comic misunderstanding.

This miscalculation is especially frustrating because there are serious points here that get lost in the tonal mess. Bessie’s story is important, and when Eleanor starts to relate it, Johansson wisely flashes back to those kitchen-table scenes in Florida, allowing Bessie to speak. Zohar, who is an actual Holocaust survivor, does moving work.

Kamen is also empathetically exploring the ways our society overlooks and underestimates older people, suggesting that Eleanor’s initial lapse into impersonation is partly rooted in her loss and isolation.

The story conveys some of this through Eleanor’s bond with Nina. Eleanor has a strained relationship with her own daughter, who is going through a divorce and dealing with work pressures, and she’s happy to “adopt” Nina. Meanwhile, Nina’s mother has recently died and her father, Roger (12 Years a Slave’s Chiwetel Ejiofor), has completely shut down. She’s looking for a maternal figure.

Some of the emotional drama works, like this touching intergenerational friendship, but other subplots are jarringly clumsy and abrupt.

Likewise, the comedy is hit-and-miss. There’s a genuinely good rabbi joke, and Eleanor’s cantankerousness can be peppery and funny. On the other hand, it’s not clear why Eleanor giving underpaid restaurant servers and retail employees a hard time is supposed to be hilarious just because she’s over 80.

By the end of Eleanor the Great, Squibb has made us laugh. She’s made us cry. But this misguided movie can’t quite bring those two modes together.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca