Eleanor the Great is a movie in two parts, adjoined, perhaps haphazardly, by another delightful performance from June Squibb. Here, Squibb plays Eleanor, a cagey old coot who doesn’t suffer the lazy and self-centered subsequent generations gladly, doesn’t mince words with nosy neighbors, and is never far from a zinger. She’s a delight. If you come to Eleanor the Great hoping for Squibb and plenty of her, then the price of admission is money well spent.

As for what Eleanor is about, that’s where things get dicey. You see, Eleanor has been living happily with her close friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar), for the past 11 years in Florida. When Bessie dies, the 94-year-old Eleanor moves back to New York City to live with her divorced daughter (Jessica Hecht) and grandson (Will Price). She also strikes up a friendship with college journalism student, Nina (Erin Kellyman), the daughter of TV anchor Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Eleanor and Nina cross paths at the local Jewish Community Center when Eleanor wanders into the wrong room and finds herself in a Holocaust survivors’ support group. Only Squibb could make a mix-up like this seem plausible, even comical.

And Squibb makes everything in Eleanor the Great plausible and comical. She has a way of gliding through situations and conversations with quick wit that renders others dumbfounded. One hapless grocery store clerk (Tristan Murphy) is told to fetch, and does. Eleanor’s daughter gets an unprovoked henpecking about who got what in the divorce. Both instances are funny, but not nearly as funny as the scene where Nina takes Eleanor on a mystery date and blindfolds Eleanor with a comical sleeping mask. Squibb exaggerates her body movements to match the eye mask’s expression with such expertise that it’s little wonder Scarlett Johansson built her feature-length directorial debut around her.

And maybe that’s the problem with Eleanor the Great. There might be too many laughs to land the serious sentiments Tory Kamen’s script wants to deliver. Eleanor is grieving. So much so that she passes Bessie’s tragic story of escaping the camps off as her own in the Holocaust survivors’ support group. Nina is grieving, too: Her mother died six months ago in an accident. Grief is the tie that binds Eleanor and Nina—at least in a theoretical sense. In a more practical sense, neither woman has a job, friends, or much else to do, so they casually fall into each other’s orbit.

Eleanor the Great is a light and bouncy movie that happens to contain one of the most devastating scene transitions I’ve seen in a while. I won’t give away the moment, but it comes early—you’ll know it when you see it. Devastating is not a descriptor you often hear in conjunction with a light and bouncy movie, but that’s the conundrum of Eleanor the Great: A fun performance anchoring a movie about the corrupting nature of grief. And when grief as a concept takes center stage in the third act, Eleanor the Great reveals itself as a discussion topic rather than an experience. It’s a movie that hopes to start a few conversations once the lights come up. But I suspect most of those conversations will be about Squibb’s performance, particularly that scene with the eye mask.

Eleanor the Great (2025)
Directed by Scarlett Johansson
Screenplay by Tory Kamen
Produced by Jessamine Burgum, Kara Durrett, Keenan Flynn, Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Lia, Celine Rattray, Trudie Styler
Starring: June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Hecht, Rita Zohar, Will Price
Sony Pictures Classics, Rated PG-13, Running time 98 minutes, Premiered May 20, 2025 at the Cannes Film Festival

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