June Squibb’s Eleanor befriends Nina, a young student played by Erin Kellyman, in new drama Eleanor the Great.Sony Pictures Classics
Eleanor the Great
Directed by Scarlett Johansson
Written by Tory Kamen
Starring June Squibb, Erin Kellyman and Chiwetel Ejiofor
Classification PG; 98 minutes
Opens in select theatres Sept. 26
One day, hopefully in the not too distant future, the New York Museum of Modern Art should curate a series of films under the title “Pickle Pictures: The Semitic Films of Greater Manhattan.”
There are already a handful of candidates for inclusion, ranging from Joan Micklin Silver’s romcom Crossing Delancey (which featured Peter Riegert as a pickle salesman) to Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (a speared dill practically plays a supporting role in the film’s most iconic scene) to, of course, Brandon Trost’s deeply underrated comedy An American Pickle (in which Seth Rogen played an Eastern European Jewish immigrant from the 1920s whose body is accidentally preserved in a giant vat of pickling juice).
The unifying theme is, of course, not the particular joys of preserved cucumbers but the vastness and complexities of the American Jewish experience, as viewed through the eyes of those struggling to live and love in the greatest city in the world.
Film Review: Seth Rogen’s An American Pickle is a sweet and sour ode to Judaism that even your bubbe will love
And now, with the arrival of Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, the as-yet-unsanctified canon of Pickle Pictures has a new contender. Even if, as the film stretches on, it’s clear that the actor is only working with a half- and not full-sour jar.
Opening in a South Florida grocery store with perhaps the greatest pickle gag of all time, Eleanor the Great follows the nonagenarian character of its title (played by June Squibb) as she navigates her quotidian life with the stubborn spirit of a thousand bubbes. But after Eleanor’s best friend and roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) passes away, Eleanor is forced to move back to Manhattan, where she’s taken in by her somewhat estranged daughter (Jessica Hecht).
In a bid to make new friends, Eleanor shuffles off to the local Jewish community centre, where she mistakenly attends a Holocaust survivors’ group, and then – through ostensibly comical but rather grim circumstances – ends up misappropriating Bessie’s history as a Second World War survivor as her own life story.
After Eleanor’s best friend and roommate passes away, the nonagenarian has to move back to Manhattan, where she’s taken in by her daughter.Jojo Whilden/Sony Pictures Classics
Eleanor’s trail of lies – at first little and white, but then growing immensely dark – eventually ropes in everyone in her orbit, including her daughter, her rabbi, a young student named Nina (Erin Kellyman) who is wrestling with both her faith and her family after the death of her mother, and Nina’s father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a local newscaster who smells a good story.
At once admirable and wobbly, Johansson’s first turn behind the camera – she neglects to give herself a supporting role, a temptation that is usually high for many actors-turned-directors – is consistently intriguing, if not always for the right reasons. Johansson possesses a sharp eye when it comes to a sense of place, whether it be Eleanor’s Florida stomping grounds or the Manhattan enclave of Yorkville, an Upper East Side neighbourhood that was once home to much of the city’s Jewish community. (There is one scene shot inside a local synagogue that feels both grand and haunting, its congregation reduced to wisps of worshippers.)
The director also has a firm grasp on character, allowing the always wonderful Squibb – still staring down performers half her age, or younger – to work her usual magic as the unflappable but also deeply wounded Eleanor. Zohar and the perpetually underrecognized and underutilized Hecht (who worked with Johansson on the 2010 Broadway production of A View from the Bridge) also deliver, matching wits with Squibb at every turn. (Zohar gets an especially tender spotlight toward the film’s very end.)
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Yet the director doesn’t have as firm a grasp on the story’s more chin-scratching developments, especially as Tory Kamen’s screenplay keeps leapfrogging from one overly convenient twist to the next. To subvert a Holocaust survivor’s experience – to open the door to questioning a survivor’s story – is a massive narrative gambit that requires the utmost of emotional nuance, sensitivity and depth. And for the most part, that is an approach just out of the filmmaker’s grasp.
The result is a drama that tries to be a comedy, and a comedy that doesn’t know that it is in fact a drama, with the resulting story uneasily resting somewhere along the border separating the profound from the perfunctory.
There are moments, many of them, throughout the film that promise a great future for Johansson as a director. But as it lands, Eleanor the Great hands its audience something of a problem. A pickle, you might say.
