ELEANOR THE GREAT - Mark Reviews Movies

Eleanor the Great, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 25, 2025

June Squibb, the longtime-working actress who gets her second leading role while in her 90s, seems incapable of doing wrong, but Eleanor the Great really, really tries to make us think she could. That Squibb is wholly sympathetic as Eleanor, an older woman who is unnecessarily judgmental about her adult daughter and more than a bit skeptical about pretty much everything/everyone else in the world, is to be expected. Those qualities, though, are not the worst Eleanor has to offer, and one almost needs to prepare for what the premise of director Scarlett Johansson's debut feature actually is.

Before we get to that, let's speak of Squibb and her character some more—outside of the big thing that will have to be revealed sooner rather than later here. Eleanor is a widow, who moved from New York City, where she lived for all of her until then, to Florida, and at the start of the story, she lives with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). The two women sleep in separate twin beds in the same room. They wake up at the same time each morning, have the same routine for the entirety of the day, and love every minute of it that they share together, especially when they get to make fun of or belittle some poor person who underestimates them in any way.

One day, Bessie collapses while they're out, and even though the two talk and smile and laugh at the hospital, Eleanor returns home to clear her best friend's bed, because Bessie won't be needing it anymore. After the death of decades-long friend, Eleanor returns to New York to live with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and grandson Max (Will Price).

Eleanor knows what the deal here is before Lisa can even suggest it: This stay is only temporary, because the daughter thinks her mother would be better off in a retirement home. We're with Eleanor in this debate, because she clearly established herself as being more capable and cleverer than anyone thinks she could be, and even if the woman is a bit mean toward Lisa, we mostly get this rebellion of hers.

Okay, here we go. Eleanor also lies about being a Holocaust survivor. It's innocent—or, at least, as "innocent" as such a deception can be—and not a regular thing for the woman. She just goes to a local Jewish community center, accidentally finds herself in a support group of survivors, and, not wanting to be rude or embarrassed about the mistake, tells the group the one story of survival she knows: the one Bessie finally told her after many decades of suffering in silence.

The plot is about how this moment spirals out of control in ways that are, well, very contrived and not especially interested in why Eleanor might have lied on some deeper level than momentary pressure, in who Eleanor is outside of this lie, or in the shared grief amongst its assorted characters. To be sure, Tory Kamen's screenplay is about grief—what it makes us do and how people generally don't confront it. We know this because the entirety of the story resolves itself with a character giving a speech about grief—what it compels us do and how people are so good at avoiding it.

This isn't subtle stuff, in other words, but then again, it's not as if anyone should expect that once Eleanor presents Bessie's story of trauma and guilt as her own to a group of Holocaust survivors. Indeed, it's almost impossible to determine what to anticipate from this movie as soon as that moment happens. There are some lies that people shouldn't tell and that should make anyone who does tell them become wholly unsympathetic. The fact that Squibb is the kind of actress who and has the kind of presence that doesn't instantly make us see Eleanor that way is proof of how talented she is as an actor and how charming she is on screen.

The whole story, though, ends up being about trying to justify the lie in some way or several ways. That's a lot of work for a movie that otherwise might have been a sweet story about people discovering each other in grief and wanting to find a way through it. Instead, we're just waiting for the distasteful gimmick to make some kind of thematic sense.

The central relationship here becomes the one between Eleanor and Nina (Erin Kellyman), a college student studying journalism, who is observing the support group meeting for a school assignment. The story Eleanor tells is so heartbreaking that Nina wants to interview her directly about it, and after it becomes clear that neither her daughter nor her grandson has much time for her, Eleanor starts hanging out with Nina. The young woman's mother, who was Jewish, died several months prior, and her father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor) won't talk about it. Eleanor, however, listens to Nina when she does talk about her mother.

There are other threads here, but they're irrelevant, really, compared to how pleasant the unlikely friendship is and how confounding the entire premise turns out to be. Eleanor the Great writes itself into this corner for no particular reason, so watching it try to get out is uncomfortable.

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