October 4, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Scarlett Johansson
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City and briefly in Florida, the comedy/drama film “Eleanor the Great” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans and Asians) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A sassy Jewish widow befriends a young journalism student, who wants to do a story about the widow being a Holocaust survivor, but the widow has a big, scandalous secret.
Culture Audience: “Eleanor the Great” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, director Scarlett Johansson, and comedy/dramas about senior citizens and how people cope with grief.
“Eleanor the Great” has talented performances and a well-intentioned story about coping with grief. However, this comedy/drama is problematic for how it tries to make dishonesty and rudeness from an old person look cute. The elderly age of the movie’s title character is used as an excuse for too many repulsive things that wouldn’t be excused as easily if a younger person did those things.
Directed by Scarlett Johansson and written by Tory Kamen, “Eleanor the Great” is Johansson’s feature-film directorial debut. Johansson, who is best known as an actress, does not appear in the movie but is one of the film’s producers. “Eleanor the Great” had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and its North American premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. The movie takes place mostly in New York City (where “Eleanor the Great” was filmed on location) and briefly in Florida.
“Eleanor the Great” begins by showing best friends Eleanor Morgenstein (played by June Squibb) and Bessie Stern (played by Rita Zohar), who are both widows, waking up in separate beds in the same room in the apartment that they share in somewhere in Florida. Eleanor says, “Bessie, we overslept. You look tired.” Eleanor says it in a way that doesn’t express concern but has a condescending attitude. Bessie replies, “Thanks.”
This scene sets the tone for the rest of the movie: Eleanor makes unflattering comments or outright insults to people, and they just allow her to do it because she’s Eleanor. In the movie, Eleanor being “sassy” is supposed to be amusing. Eleanor, who is 94 years old, usually acts like she’s smarter than almost everyone who interacts with her, just because she’s lived to this advanced age. In real life, many people would think Eleanor is irritating and certainly not as adorable as the movie wants us to think she is.
Even with Eleanor’s flaws, there’s no denying that Eleanor and Bessie (who have been best friends for about 70 years) have a genuine friendship. When Bessie dies, Eleanor decides to move back to New York City, where she lived for 40 years with her husband Harry. Eleanor moves in with her divorced daughter Lisa (played by Jessica Hecht), whose son Max (played by Will Price) is a first-year university student who lives on campus. Max is friendly, but he’s barely in the movie: His screen time is less than 10 minutes.
Eleanor is kind and loving to Max, but she frequently insults Lisa, for no apparent reason. Eleanor’s insults are often delivered with a smile or “mother knows best” tone. However, Eleanor’s derogatory remarks and criticisms are still insults that she knows will hurt insecure Lisa, who has the maturity not to sink to Eleanor’s mean-spirited level. Eleanor’s snide comments about Lisa’s physical appearance are especially petty. Lisa does her best to please Eleanor, but Eleanor never seems completely appreciative and accepting of Lisa.
Viewers can only guess why Eleanor is often unkind to her only child, but it’s hinted that Eleanor is resentful that Lisa didn’t keep in touch with Eleanor as much as Eleanor would’ve liked when Eleanor lived in Florida. If Eleanor has treated Lisa this way for most of Lisa’s life, then it’s no wonder that Lisa would avoid being in regular contact with Eleanor. As it is, the movie doesn’t give enough background information about the type of mother that Eleanor was before she moved in with Lisa.
Lisa has a full-time job, but Eleanor is resentful that Lisa won’t be spending as much time with Eleanor during the day as Eleanor expected. Lisa thoughtfully signs up Eleanor to be a member of the nearest Jewish Community Center (JCC) to keep Eleanor busy and social during the day. Eleanor reluctantly attends a JCC singing class, where she thinks the featured singer (played by Beth Goodrich) is awful and isn’t afraid to say so out loud as Eleanor walks out of the class.
At the JCC, Eleanor wanders into a room where there’s a support group meeting for Holocaust survivors. Eleanor says she’s a native of Poland who escaped from Nazi persecution in the 1940s, and she moved to the United States in 1953. She tells a personal Holocaust story, which emotionally moves a visitor in the group: Nina Davis (played by Erin Kellyman), an undergraduate journalism student at New York University (NYU). Nina, who is in her sophomore year at NYU, asks Eleanor if she can interview Eleanor for an academic assignment story that Nina has decided to do about Holocaust survivors. Eleanor says no but then changes her mind.
Over time, brash Eleanor and sensitive Nina become friends who both open up to each about their grief. Nina was very close to her mother Jane, who died about six months earlier. Jane was Jewish and a successful photographer, so there are multiple scenes where Nina looks mournfully at the photos that her mother took. Nina and Eleanor do Jewish activities together, such as go to synagogue services or eat Jewish food when they go out for meals. Nina is biracial (her father is African American), but her black/African American ethnicity is sidelined and barely acknowledged in the movie.
Nina’s father Roger Davis (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is an anchor on local TV station Spectrum News NY1, is emotionally distant and doesn’t like to talk about Jane’s death. Nina chose to do a feature profile on Eleanor for a class assignment partly because Nina wants to do a story connected to Nina’s Jewish heritage and partly because Nina wants to impress her father in Nina’s aspirations to be a journalist. Spectrum News NY1 ends up becoming interested in Eleanor’s Holocaust story because of Nina’s NYU assignment coverage.
Eleanor spends more time with Nina than Eleanor’s biological family members. Nina is a self-proclaimed loner who says she doesn’t feel completely comfortable with many of her university peers. Unlike the stern and judgmental way that Eleanor treats Lisa, Eleanor is warm and open-minded in how she treats Nina. For example, when Nina casually mentions that she’s a lesbian, Eleanor smiles and immediately says she thinks it’s great that Nina can be herself.
Even though much of “Eleanor the Great” has scenes of Eleanor and Nina openly sharing their feelings, Eleanor has a big secret that is revealed to viewers about halfway through the movie. Even without this reveal, it’s easy to figure out that Eleanor is hiding something because of her reluctance to go on camera to tell her life story. It’s a secret that involves huge betrayals of trust.
“Eleanor the Great” (which is a solid directorial debut from Johansson) excels when it’s about the friendship that develops between Eleanor and Nina, because it shows the best side of Eleanor. Where the movie falters is in the hokey way that Eleanor’s problem is resolved. It’s just a little too contrived and needed more realism. Ultimately, “Eleanor the Great” is a feel-good movie whose quality is lowered by its cloying and unjustified schmaltziness, but Squibb carries the movie with a certain undeniable charm.
Sony Pictures Classics released “Eleanor the Great” in select U.S. cinemas on September 26, 2025. A sneak preview of the movie was shown in U.S. cinemas on September 15, 2025.
