Eleanor the Great Review: Queen of Manhattan

June Squibb is a hilarious delight in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut Eleanor the Great, helping it overcome contrived plotting.

Eleanor the Great offers her another great leading role, but it has similar problems to Thelma with its script, leaving Squibb to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Despite Squibb’s leading role, the biggest name on Eleanor the Great’s poster is bound to be Scarlett Johansson. Making her directorial debut, the erstwhile Black Widow seeks to create a tribute to her hometown of New York. The hustle and bustle of Manhattan has forever made it seem intimidating to anyone not able-bodied enough to keep up with its pace, but despite living away from the city for several decades, it’s obvious this no-nonsense nonagenarian can handle it.

Eleanor resides in a Florida retirement community with her longtime friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). The pair show off their morning routine and sharp wits with flair (Not many of us would get away with telling a supermarket shelf-stacker to “Go fetch”), but even the most robust of personalities can’t compete with the Reaper. Bessie suddenly passes away, leaving Eleanor bereft and with little other company to keep her in situ. Johansson makes her voice heard in quieter scenes, emphasizing Bessie’s absence with empty spaces in the frame while Eleanor carries on.

Eleanor decides to return to New York, where her daughter (Jessica Hecht) and grandson Max (Will Price) await. As soon as she gets off the plane, she proves that Florida hasn’t softened her edge (To Max, with Lisa in earshot: “Is she feeding you?”). As written in Tory Kamen’s script, Eleanor is the ultimate tough-as-leather Jewish granny, with no filter and no fear. Despite previously living in Brooklyn, she takes to her new Manhattan digs like a duck to water. There is humour in something as simple as seeing Eleanor sitting in a park sipping a frappuccino. She’s doing whatever she wants, and naysayers be damned. Even so, there’s always something nagging at Eleanor. Even more so than her late husband, she misses Bessie, and Johansson’s fixation on Squibb’s vulnerable eyes makes sure that absence is felt throughout Eleanor the Great.

Eleanor’s loneliness should be powerful enough to carry Eleanor the Great emotionally, but the script lacks the confidence to let Eleanor deal with her pain in any expected way. Instead, contrivances begin to set in. Lisa signs Eleanor up for a choir at the local Jewish community centre, but she accidentally ends up in a Holocaust survivors’ group. Eleanor isn’t a survivor; she’s not even Jewish by birth. Most people would recognize their error and get up to leave, but Eleanor decides to take it on herself to tell Bessie’s stories.

Flashbacks show Bessie sharing the horrors she went through under the Nazis as a child, but Eleanor never identifies the stories as Bessie’s, but rather as her own. Comedy can be mined from most any topic, but it takes a deft hand to usher the material through its own potential for crassness. There’s nothing offensive in Eleanor the Great, but the events Eleanor depicts end up being there just for the sake of creating drama. The script isn’t challenging enough to do anything interesting with the premise.

What we do get, however, is Eleanor being contacted by Nina (Erin Kellyman), a journalism student who heard Eleanor speak at the class while conducting research for an article. Nina senses something special in her ability to speak up, and not be trampled down by her experiences. Of course, Eleanor never had the experiences she claims, but she’s started this ruse, and now has to see it through. It’s the old ‘liar exposed’ plot, one whose end you can see a mile away, and which will likely lead to emotional confessions and attempts to patch things up regardless of how big the lie gets. 

An unlikely friendship blooms between Nina and Eleanor; Nina has recently lost her mother, and her TV presenter father (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is losing himself in work rather than family. Through all this, Eleanor has to keep up her pretence, though by the time she arranges to get herself bat mitzvahed, we’re just waiting for the lie to blow up, for emotions to be spilled, and for heartfelt speeches to be made (Ejiofor delivers a doozy later on that nearly stops the film dead with its mawkishness).

Through all the predictability of Eleanor the Great, two women see you through. Squibb gives Eleanor more vulnerability than perhaps is present in the script, inviting the audience to stick with her through this mess of her own making. Her chemistry with Kellyman is especially endearing, even while we’re imploring her to just tell the truth. Behind the camera, Johansson keeps things light. It never rains in her sunny vision of Manhattan, and there are always some laughs to be had from Eleanor’s blunt delivery.

If Eleanor the Great threatens to be forgotten, the ending saves it. The film finally sits down with Zohar’s Bessie to listen for an extended moment to her story. There’s a sincerity in this epilogue that the rest of Eleanor the Great sorely lacks.

Eleanor the Great premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21-22, 2025.