Eleanor the Great (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
Sep 25
4 min read

ELEANOR THE GREAT (2025)

Starring June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rita Zohar, Will Price, Greg Kaston, Lauren Klein, Stephen Singer, Beth Goodrich, Elaine Bromka, Ray Anthony Thomas, Cole Tristan Murphy, Cole Ragsdale, Stephen Bradbury, TJ Lee, Barbara Andres, Sami Steigmann, Mila Falkof, Marcha Kia, Brian Bigalke and Lia Lando.

Screenplay by Tory Kamen.

Directed by Scarlett Johansson.

Distributed by TriStar Pictures. 98 minutes. Rated PG-13.

It’s kind of amazing – particularly in this youth-obsessed industry – that June Squibb is finally now getting to play lead roles in films when she is in her mid-90s. Of course, she has had a long and storied career – mostly on stage, where she made her Broadway debut in Gypsy in 1959 with Ethel Merman and Jack Klugman.

With a theatrical career that has lasted over 70 years (she’s about to return to Broadway in the lead role of Marjorie Prime), Squibb was relatively late to the game as a film actor, first appearing in Woody Allen’s Alice in 1990. Since then she has had a respected career as a supporting actress in the movies.

Her best-known performance was probably her Oscar-nominated role as Bruce Dern’s crotchety wife in Nebraska (2013), however she was also in such films as The Age of Innocence (1993), In & Out (1997), Meet Joe Black (1998), About Schmidt (2002), Far from Heaven (2002) and even in animated hits like Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), Toy Story 4 (2019), Soul (2020), and Inside Out 2 (2024).

However, after an extensive career of playing backing roles, in the past two years Squibb has been cast in the leads of two movies. Last year she starred in the action-comedy Thelma, which honestly wasn’t a great film, but she was damned good in it. Now she is front-and-center in actress Scarlett Johansson’s directing debut, the sweet – if rather uneven – Eleanor the Great.

Squibb plays the title role, a 94-year-old widow who has spent the last decade or so of her life sharing an apartment in Florida with her long-time best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). They had been friends for decades – as young women in New York and in their older years down south -- and moved in together when both of their husbands passed away.

Bessie was a holocaust survivor, and Eleanor was from the Midwest and converted to Judaism as an adult when she got married. However, they were inseparable, sharing single beds in the same room and spending all of their time together. We see early on that Eleanor is not above telling a lie to get what she wants, a habit which will come back to bite her later.

Eleanor’s life is thrown into chaos when Bessie has a fatal heart attack. Suddenly she has to deal with real loneliness. Her adult daughter (Jessica Hecht) convinces Eleanor to come to live with her and her son up in New York, but with her daughter’s job and her grandson’s school, they don’t have much time for their new roommate.

The real complication in Eleanor’s life is when her daughter, trying to find something for Eleanor to do, sends her to the local Jewish Community Center for a class. Through a misunderstanding, Eleanor ends up in a support group for Holocaust survivors. When called upon to talk about her experiences, instead of explaining the mix-up, Eleanor instead starts telling some of Bessie’s war stories as if they were her own experiences.

Ouch.

It turns out that sitting in on the group was a college journalist (Erin Kellyman) who wants to do a story on Eleanor’s life – not realizing it was actually Bessie’s.

Double ouch.

And the journalist’s dad turns out to be a famous TV news anchor who also wants to do a big story on Eleanor.

Triple ouch.

It’s all a rather disturbing circumstance that could have been defused at many different points if Eleanor just told the truth. However, the lie continues to build and build to the point where Eleanor has no great options. She has befriended the survivor community and the young writer, and she is horrified that they may find out that what she said was not her own story, but she never can quite say the words until it all blows up in her face.

Eleanor the Great chalks it all up to living with extreme grief, and this may even be partially true. However, the film sort of lets her off the hook for what she did – which, let’s face it, is pretty horrible. Squibb’s sheer likability makes her character lovable, though, even when she is doing some pretty terrible things.

Still, Eleanor the Great is telling an important story of modern Judaism and Bessie’s story – which is often told in flashback by the original character – is gripping and tragic. So while the movie stumbles, it has much that is worth seeing.

Jay S. Jacobs