Eleanor The Great
Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great opens with the kind of friendship rarely given centre stage in cinema – two elderly women sharing a Florida apartment, exercising on the beach, bickering affectionately over pickles in a supermarket. Then, almost without warning, Bessie (Rita Zohar) dies within the first ten minutes, and her absence haunts every frame thereafter. What follows is not quite a comedy, not quite a tragedy, but something more elusive: an introspection on loneliness, identity and the blurry ethics of storytelling – anchored by a quippy, quietly powerful performance from June Squibb in the titular role.
At 94, Eleanor Morgenstein is prickly, perceptive, and completely unequipped for solitude. Squibb plays her as someone halfway between Lucille Ball and Joan Rivers – all nosy barbs and unapologetic honesty. When she moves to New York to live with her daughter and grandson, she inadvertently ends up in a Holocaust survivors’ support group at the Jewish Community Centre – and begins telling Bessie’s story as if it were her own.
It’s a morally murky concept, to say the least. But screenwriter Tory Kamen treats the appropriation less as a punchline than a provocation. The film toys with a clever allusion to the biblical story of Jacob and Esau – Eleanor dressing herself in borrowed grief, rather than Jacob’s sheepskin. She lies not for personal gain, but to fill the unbearable silence Bessie left behind.
There’s a temptation to reduce Eleanor the Great to its plot – but its ambitions are more nuanced, if occasionally uneven. It’s less about the fraud than the emotional fissures that lead to it. The easy comedy never quite allows the drama to settle, yet it’s Squibb’s dexterity that holds the tonal balance together. Her delivery is impeccably sharp, with one-liners landing so effortlessly that the heartbreak beneath them often catches you off guard.
While the final act feels a little too neat, and the resolution perhaps overly forgiving, Eleanor the Great still achieves something remarkable: a warm, offbeat portrait of grief that embraces – with surprising generosity – the strange and sometimes troubling ways we try to make sense of loss.
Christina Yang
Eleanor The Great does not have a release date yet.
Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.
Watch the trailer for Eleanor The Great here:
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