In films, characters have often lied their way into love, power, or belonging, and eventually those lies catch up with them. That rhythm is almost a rule of storytelling: the lie may charm for a while, but the truth always breaks through. Even when deception is portrayed as inevitable or softened by good intentions, the reckoning keeps the story honest. Even films often criticized as misguided, like Dear Evan Hansen, understood that. It is what allows us to see the line between desperation and manipulation. Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, ignores that line. It builds its entire drama around a deeply troubling lie, then bends the story to excuse it, downplaying the harm and turning the deception itself into something tender and uplifting instead of something that demands consequences.
The film follows Eleanor, an elderly woman who has lived with her best friend for decades. After her friend passes, she reluctantly moves to New York to stay with her daughter. There, she joins a Jewish community group, where she is mistakenly assumed to be a Holocaust survivor. Instead of correcting the mistake, Eleanor begins retelling her late friend’s stories of survival as if they were her own. The sympathy and attention this generates allow her to form new connections and find a sense of belonging. From there, the movie takes the structure of ‘how far can she keep up the lie’, with Johansson treating the need to lie with earnest tenderness, as though this deception is not only forgivable but even admirable.
Even outside of this misguided premise, much of the film rubs me the wrong way since its festival premiere. It is a by-the-book piece of safe directing with obvious faults that somehow found a place in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, a section meant to spotlight daring voices but here secured mainly through Johansson’s name. Johansson leans on the fact that Eleanor is a lonely old woman and softens her further by casting June Squibb, whose natural warmth and comic timing have made her a delight to watch for decades (her appearance at this year’s Oscars was enormously endearing). But here, that warmth feels like a shield, used to push the audience past behavior that should have been challenged. Experience and age should make Eleanor know better, and Squibb’s charm, repurposed to excuse her actions, feels manipulative.
Even trying to look past these missteps, as a film it is has many faults, especially in its technical aspects. Johansson’s direction is cautious, constantly pulling the story toward warmth even when it clashes with the material, and relying on Squibb’s charisma to define the character, even when that contradicts her actions. Other characters never feel like human beings. The music is standard indie-film piano, trying to recall the films of Alexander Payne cheaply. The cinematography has little texture, often resembling a direct-to-streaming release. The editing is choppy, with mismatched shots and cuts at odd moments that pull you out of the film. Most of all, the tone never settles. Dark humor, empathy, and grief crash against each other, leaving us unsure whether we are meant to feel the tragedy of the Holocaust, laugh at Eleanor’s snarky and cruel remarks, or pity her solitude. All of them are answered in the movie.
Which begs the question: why the Holocaust? Why use one of humankind’s greatest crimes and deepest tragedies as the backdrop for another conversation that is weighty and relevant on its own? If the goal was to explore loneliness, invisibility, or the hunger to be seen, especially at a wrong age, why not a smaller accident, a different religious background, or any number of lies that would still carry consequences without trivializing real trauma? If the Holocaust theme had to be kept, its entire approach needed to change, because invoking it drags Eleanor’s loneliness into much darker territory, closer to a grim story the film never faces. Was she really so neglected? Her daughter may at times dismiss her, but she was not cruel, and her grandson treated her with care and respect. Eleanor herself was no angel even before the lie, making a cruel aside delivered to provoke jealousy in a neighbor and being dismissive toward a supermarket worker. Even so, her desperation could have been moving, even heartbreaking, had the film allowed her deception to meet real consequences. Forgiveness, if it came, would have been richer and harder earned, not reduced to one of cinema’s worst conveniences, with an established and famous journalist using real news coverage to excuse a giant lie and turn it into a tool for his own healing over the death of his wife. It is all simply too much.
There is an important conversation to be had about forgiveness, and a story worth telling about an old woman’s search for meaning. But Eleanor the Great chooses the most misguided shields imaginable at every turn in a way that we are not able to have these conversations, and by softening them, the film sacrifices both honesty and moral clarity.
This is part of Reviews On Reels TIFF 2025 Coverage. Due to the hectic rhythm of a film festival, it may be tweaked in the future.
Still courtesy of TIFF.