Movie Review: Friendship, grief and June Squibb in ‘Eleanor the Great’

There is a lovely story of friendship, grief and starting over at the heart of “Eleanor the Great.” The film, directed by Scarlett Johansson in her feature debut, gets tangled in a plot contrivance that is, at best, unnecessary and at worst, loathsome.

That’s the problem with the elevator pitch mentality, though. A story about a 90-something trying to make friends in a new city might sound a little too simple, a little too straightforward. What if she does so by pretending to be a Holocaust survivor? I’m not kidding.

Eleanor is played by June Squibb (the great). At 94-years-old, she has moved from Florida to New York after the death of her best friend and roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar). Her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), and grandson, Max (Will Price), have taken her into their small Manhattan apartment, but they only seem interested in getting Eleanor into an assisted living arrangement. Lisa especially treats her mother’s presence like an inconvenience, a problem to fix, and Eleanor starts looking elsewhere for companionship.

The thing is Eleanor had a great life in Florida, living with her platonic best friend in a little apartment. The script, Tory Kamen’s first produced screenplay, smartly introduces this idyllic moment first. It is a distinct joy to watch the two nonagenarians go about their daily activities, from velcroing their shoes to doing their exercises on the beach.

Squibb recently had a version of this in the delightful “Thelma,” but there she was alone, a widow determined to hold onto her independent living situation. Here, Bessie and Eleanor help each other, whether it’s waking up on time, or standing up for the other at the local supermarket when their preferred brand of kosher pickles isn’t on the shelf and the teenage employee dares to suggest that “all pickles taste the same.” Then Bessie suddenly dies, and Eleanor is left with no choice but to start over.

It’s hard to make new friends anywhere, at any age, but perhaps even more so in drizzly, cold New York. When a friendly woman at the Jewish Community Center asks Eleanor if she’s here for “the group,” Eleanor doesn’t question it. Yes, she says with a relieved smile. When it becomes clear that this group is for Holocaust survivors, she does try to leave, but everyone encourages her to stay and suddenly she’s telling Bessie’s story of losing her brother in Poland as her own. The script has already established Eleanor as a bit of a liar — but they’re the small kinds, the white lies that, she says, aren’t hurting anyone.

This might have just been a one-time thing, but sitting in the room is an NYU journalism student, Nina (Erin Kellyman), who is moved to tears and wants to talk to Eleanor more. The two develop an unlikely, but incredibly sweet friendship.

Nina has recently lost her mother and finds solace in this relationship. It’s here where you can start to see how the rest of the movie is going to play out, how the lie will go on too long and be exposed at a terrible time, leading to inevitable feelings of betrayal and humiliation. And it is very, very hard to watch Squibb in distress. Rather than celebrate the performance you want to lash out at the script that put her in this situation in the first place. That may not be fair but it’s also true.

The story becomes less of a character study of the strange ways in which grief manifests and more about the escalating hijinks of a lie that takes on a wild life of its own. Soon Eleanor is speaking to Nina’s journalism peers in an on-the-record, taped conversation, telling another of Bessie’s stories. Then, Nina’s distant father ( Chiwetel Ejiofor ), a local news anchor, decides Eleanor’s is a great human-interest story for his show.

There is a thread about the merits of preserving memory, but it’s introduced a little too late and too flimsily to justify all that came before it. Johansson directs the proceedings simply, like a classic New York character drama, allowing the performances to shine over the filmmaking, but who she is as a filmmaker remains to be seen. Squibb and Kellyman, both terrific, are the real reasons to seek out “Eleanor the Great.” The film may trip over its own contrivances but their performances will leave you moved.

“Eleanor the Great,” a Sony Pictures Classics release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “some language, thematic elements and suggestive references.” Running time: 98 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.