Ghost In The Shull
My thoughts on Eleanor the Great
Eleanor the Great, the directorial debut of actress Scarlett Johansson, is a film with a premise that will strike many observers as being somewhat problematic, to put it delicately. However, the problem with the film is not so much the premise as it is the way that, having established it, seems to go out of its way to avoid the potentially upsetting (not to mention potentially intriguing) ramifications of that premise in order to take an approach that replaces the darkness with bland, cloying sentimentality to such a point that the entire project is essentially rendered moot. This is a shame because that troublesome initial idea is not without interest and it contains a performance from 95-year-old a tree June Squibb that is good enough to almost make the whole sorry mess work from time to time.
She plays Eleanor Morgenstern, a Jewish widow of a certain age who has been living in Florida with her longtime best friend and fellow Jewish widow Bessie (Rita Zohar) and having fun playfully tormenting cloddish supermarket employees and the like. They are clearly enjoying their lives and so when Bessie passes away and Eleanor is forced to move back to New York into a too-small apartment with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) and teen grandson (Will Price), she is at a loss at what to do with her days. Trying to find a way to occupy her time while avoiding her daughter’s increasingly pointed suggestions about the possibility of moving into a care facility, Eleanor goes to the local community center and winds up sitting in with a Jewish seniors group, only to discover too late that it is a group specifically for Holocaust survivors designed to allow them to share their stories—sometimes for the first time—in a safe space. When it is her turn, she begins talking about her experiences trying to survive and the memories of her beloved brother, who didn’t make it, moving the other members with her harrowing tale.
The one hitch is that Eleanor is not a Holocaust survivor—she was growing up in Des Moines at the time—and the tale that she told actually happened to Bessie, who recounted it to Eleanor for the first and only time of her life one night after waking up from a nightmare. This is awful behavior, of course, and even though Eleanor realizes that, she convinces herself that by giving voice to Bessie’s story at last, even under deceptive circumstances, she is honoring her friend’s memory. This one lie becomes increasingly complicated when it turns out that another one of the attendees is Nina (Erin Kellyman), a NYU journalism student who recently lost her mother and who is moved enough by Eleanor and “her” story, particularly her desire to finally receive a bat mitzvah, to want to write about her for a class project. If that weren’t enough, Nina’s father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a TV news commentator, is interested enough by her article to want to pursue Eleanor’s story as well, leading to the inevitable moment when the truth is revealed at the most awkward time imaginable.
Regardless of one’s religious affiliation, I think we can all mostly agree that appropriating someone else’s personal story of surviving the Holocaust, no matter how noble the intent might have been, is awful for any number of reasons ranging from stealing another person’s existence to giving fodder for those who like to claim that the Holocaust never happened. At the same time, I can also imagine that premise serving as the inspiration of a very dark and potentially very funny comedy in the hands of someone not afraid to deal with the implications of the premise and the brutal humiliation the main character would have to face once the truth came out—just picture such a tale being handled by the likes of Elaine May or Larry David, two people who have transformed similarly edgy concepts into grand excursions into cringe comedy.
The problem is that once the basic idea is set up, the screenplay by Tory Kamen almost immediately tries to remove any potential prickliness from the proceedings. Even as Eleanor’s lie grows larger and larger as more people hook in to it, we never get any sense that she has any feelings of remorse regarding what she is doing nor is there any of the tension that we might expect to feel as the film moves towards the inevitable revelation of the truth. Then, when that revelation finally occurs, it basically amounts to nothing, as if the film just didn’t have the heart to take dear Eleanor to task for her actions. Fine, I don’t necessarily want to come down too hard on a 95-year-old woman either but if you aren’t going to take her to task for what she has done, then why bother making the film in the first place. Actually, the film goes even further than that with a couple of scenes in which people who should be very hurt and angry prove to be way too forgiving in ways that essentially ask “Well, if you are going to get mad at a nice old woman for telling a little lie about the Holocaust and not instantly forgive her when she gets caught, then who is the real Nazi?”
As a director, Johansson can’t do much to help save Eleanor the Great—the earnest tone that she establishes earlier only makes the proceedings feel even more off-putting—but she keeps things moving along at a reasonable, if not particularly memorable, clip. (The only scenes that really come alive are the ones at the beginning between Eleanor and Rita, who are clearly meant to suggest older versions of the characters that she and Thora Birch played so memorably in Ghost World, a film that offered any number of discomfiting elements but had enough faith in itself to tackle them rather than avoid them.) It also contain yet another splendid performance from Squibb, who is such a delight here (even when she probably shouldn’t be) that she manages to make the proceedings seem more palatable than they actually are, though I would have loved to see what she could have done with a more honest and direct presentation of the premise than the drivel she is working with here. Alas, while her Eleanor may be great (or at least very good), the rest of Eleanor the Great is anything but.