The Reel Review
When her roommate and best friend of 70 years dies, 94-year-old Eleanor moves from Florida to New York to live with her daughter and grandson. While getting settled in, she accidentally stumbles into a Holocaust survivors group, where she ends up sharing her best friend’s harrowing Holocaust story as though it were her own. June Squibb, Erin Kellyman and Rita Zohar star in this drama.
At first glance the premise seems hackneyed and unpleasantly cringeworthy, but in her directing debut, actress Scarlett Johansson gives the film charm, capturing the grief, loneliness and disorienting heartache of losing one’s best friend. The heartfelt story, filled with sweet, simple reminders of our looming mortality, more than makes up for its slow and at times awkward pacing.
Squibb carries the film beautifully, injecting humor into her character, aided by a superb supporting cast that includes Kellyman (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, 28 Years Later, Willow) as the journalism student writing about Eleanor while still emotionally distraught over the recent death of her mother and Zohar (High Potential, Waterworld, Amadeus) as Eleanor’s best friend, Bessie, who ultimately provides a detailed, heart wrenching account of her survival from the Holocaust. Prepare to cry. This one is a tearjerker.
REEL FACTS
• The film was cast with several actual Holocaust survivors, most notably Rita Zohar, who was liberated by Soviet forces in 1944 just four and a half months after being born in the Balta concentration camp in Ukraine, where her mother had kept her hidden in a gap between two walls beneath a window.
• Although fiction, Eleanor the Great screenwriter Tory Kamen based the two best friends on her own grandmother Elinore and her best friend Bessie, who, like the film’s character, was a Holocaust survivor.
• Eleanor the Great is 96-year-old June Squibb’s second film as its lead character, after 2024’s Thelma.
Video & Photo
