FILM OF THE WEEK: Eleanor the Great

Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut Eleanor the Great is a curious thing. It's a film that courts moral peril with the lightness of a Sunday-afternoon dramedy, before seeming startled by the gravity of the question it has posed.

June Squibb plays recently widowed nonagenarian, Eleanor Morgenstein, who leaves her longtime home in Florida after the death of her closest friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar.) The opening scenes showing Eleanor and Bessie’s friendship – slow walks, exercising, teasing, confiding, comforting – are the best of the movie, showing a beautiful example of tender, mutual care between equals. When Bessie dies, Eleanor moves in with her daughter in New York, and the shift to Eleanor feeling isolated, being spoken to like she’s a burden by her daughter, and constantly being cancelled on by her useless grandson, is stark. Feeling adrift, she visits a local Jewish community centre and accidentally finds herself in a support group for Holocaust survivors. When put on the spot, Eleanor starts recounting Bessie’s tragic childhood experience as though it were her own, filled with the weight of her friend’s story and Bessie’s desire for her family story to not be forgotten.

A young journalism student, Nina (Erin Kellyman) hears Eleanor’s testimony, becomes captivated, and seeks to interview Eleanor for a class assignment. Their friendship blossoms as Nina finds herself able to talk to Eleanor about the recent death of her mother. But as they become close, becoming surrogate grandmother and granddaughter to each other, Eleanor’s lie expands well beyond its impulsive beginnings and becomes increasingly difficult to unwind.

It is a premise that carries enormous moral weight, yet the film treats this central deception with a softness that never quite matches the seriousness of what it depicts. This mismatch of weight and tone is particularly striking because the film’s most resonant material concerns grief in its stubborn, shapeless forms and the way loss isolates Eleanor, Nina, and Nina’s father (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in different ways. There could have been something deep and true about grief, about loneliness, and about how two women who have been unmoored by bereavement can recognise each other’s quiet desperation long before they can articulate their own. These themes are touched on lightly, with some moments of gentle warmth, and if the film had remained in that space of subtle, intergenerational communion, it might have found a more convincing equilibrium.

The central deception demands a far deeper excavation than the film is willing to attempt. The film gestures towards discomfort but backs away from the harder questions, smoothing conflicts before they have fully taken shape and allowing emotional resolutions to arrive with a speed that feels unearned. The film at least has the good common sense to keep Eleanor away from the survivor group for most of the film, understanding that having her continue to lie as people share their true experience of the darkest parts of human history would be unbearable.

One also senses a missed opportunity in the film’s relationship to Judaism. Eleanor’s renewed engagement with ritual, community, and the inherited rhythms of Jewish life is positioned as a balm, yet the film rarely pauses to illuminate the beauty of the tradition itself, or the deeper anxieties that shape Eleanor’s sense of legacy. Who will carry her stories when she is gone, and how does a woman entering her tenth decade reckon with the erosion of memory, the thinning of family ties, the slow unspooling of a life that once felt firmly rooted in ritual and relationship? These questions are never really explored.

It is difficult not to compare the film, somewhat unfavourably, to Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. That film also pairs personal malaise with historical enormity, yet does so with a deftness that allows humour and heartbreak to sit uneasily but truthfully beside each other. Eisenberg allows the weight of history to bear down on his characters in ways that deepen and complicate their private conflicts rather than tidy them away, resulting in a meditation on grief, memory and connection that feels intimate, insightful and expansive. By contrast, Eleanor the Great seems determined to keep things light and buoyant to its detriment.

Scarlett Johansson’s direction is fluid and unobtrusive, though it will take more films to see her signature style – and hopefully her future choices won’t seem as odd. As her debut, Eleanor the Great offers good performances, some laughs from Squibb and some warmth, but it fails to balance a morally thorny premise with the comforts of a feel-good friendship story. There may be some heart here, but it needed far more courage – courage to venture into the darker rooms of the narrative, where truth and consequence wait, quietly insisting on more.

Directed by Scarlett Johansson. Written by Tory Kamen. Starring June Squibb, Rita Zohar, Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, Chiwetel Ejiofor. 98 mins In cinemas now.

• Watch the trailer below: