Eleanor the Great: Scarlett Johansson’s not-so-great tale of friendship and grief

If only Eleanor the Great lived up to its title. Scarlett Johansson makes her directorial debut with a sentimental dramedy that keeps playing duff notes. Over-reliant on the well-worn charm of June Squibb, who gave a very similar performance in Thelma last year, this tale of a feisty old lady getting into a schemozzle with her life story is about as credible as a review peppered with Yiddish slang.

Having moved to New York from Florida following the death of her oldest friend Bessie, Eleanor borrows Bessie’s experiences to join a Holocaust survivors’ group. She convinces Nina (Erin Kellyman), a journalism student observing the group, that she is the real deal, and a deep friendship forms between the two. Nina, whose mother has recently died, receives little emotional support from her grieving father Roger (an underused Chiwetel Ejiofor), a TV personality with a human-interest show and, in a contrived plot twist, Roger puts his daughter’s survivor pal on TV. Instead of a heart-warming segment, we are threatened with a stomach-churning exposure of fraud before a leap to unconvincing redemption.

In interviews, screenwriter Tory Kamen has said her script was inspired by her own grandmother’s friendship with a survivor (while stressing that she never actually impersonated her friend). The film queasily dances around the morality of the central plot and softsoaps its ethical dilemmas. At least three documentaries have been made about individuals who have falsely claimed to have endured the Holocaust and the reasons behind their impersonations, most recently Misha and the Wolves (2021). But neither Kamen nor Johansson appears interested in the psychology of identity fraud, nor the media’s appetite for Holocaust memoirs. Instead, Eleanor the Great drifts along as a banal tale of lonely individuals in search of emotional connections.

Last year’s superior Between the Temples played with many of the same tropes – a grieving young widower (Jason Schwartzmann) finds new energy by befriending an elderly Jewish woman (Carol Kane). While Kane gave a complex, generous portrayal, Squibb by comparison comes across as something of a smiling bully, telling her grandson how promiscuous his mother was at high school (“She was the class mattress”) and humiliating a store clerk who doesn’t discriminate between jars of pickles.

Johansson has so little faith in Kamen’s screenplay or her actors’ delivery to convey mood that she resorts to smothering the film with a schmaltzy soundtrack which only serves to highlight its shortcomings.

► Eleanor the Great is out now.