You would think that Scarlett Johansson would get the most attention at the premiere of her directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, at the Cannes Film Festival. But you would be wrong.
So who outshone Johansson and guests including her husband Colin Jost and two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody? That would be 95-year-old June Squibb, the star of the film, who wore a black sparkly top to the event at the Debussy theater. In the crowded room, all eyes were on Squibb.
At nearly 100 years old, Squibb is on a roll. Call it the Squibbaissance. Last year, she became an unlikely action hero in Thelma. Now she’ll make you cry in Eleanor.
Eleanor is not really the type of movie you tend to see in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, which favors challenging international fare over quirky American indies. Watching it yesterday, I got the feeling it might be more home at Sundance where a movie of its ilk tends to thrive. But in her introduction Johansson said that she had dreams of Squibb on the Croisette, and that came to fruition.
In the film, written by Tory Kamen, Squibb plays 94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein, who lives in Florida with her best friend Bessie Stern (Rita Zohar). Eleanor and Bessie are a delightful pair who live completely in sync, but while Bessie is a little more reserved, Eleanor takes charge. She’s the kind of lady who will dress down a grocery store employee to get the right kosher pickles. She will tell a nurse that Bessie is related to the owners of a hospital to get her better treatment. It’s a lie, but it works, and Eleanor is a bravura ball-buster.
When Bessie dies, Eleanor decides to move back to New York to be with her divorced daughter (Jessica Hecht) and college-aged grandson (Will Price), who don’t have much time for her. One day she wanders over to the JCC. Instead of going to the singing class she was ostensibly there to attend, she meets a kind woman who brings her into another room. It turns out it’s a support group for Holocaust survivors. Eleanor is not a survivor, but Bessie was, so she tells her story, that ability to fib coming in very handy.
Eleanor’s—well, Bessie’s story—particularly captures the attention of Nina (Erin Kellyman), an NYU student sitting in on the meeting for her journalism class. Eleanor is initially resistant to Nina’s follow-up attempts to interview her, trying to keep her lie contained, but her loneliness gets the better of her, and she invites the timid girl over to Shabbat dinner. Quickly, they become friends. Both of them are grieving—Nina recently lost her mother—and they provide genuine companionship for one another, taking trips to museums and getting their nails done as they gab about life and even sex over pizza and diner food.
The scenes between Squibb and Kellyman are where Eleanor the Great is at its best. There’s an intergenerational camaraderie between them that never feels patronizing toward Eleanor’s advanced age. Squibb makes it clear that Eleanor is quite simply a blast to be around and you can see the awe in Kellyman’s eyes.
Of course, given Eleanor’s big deception, you are aware this is all going to come crashing down, and as everything unravels there are a couple of plot points that feel like heavy-handed ways to move the story along. Similarly, Bessie’s real life Holocaust story is inserted into the narrative in a way that feels a tad clunky as Johansson tries to navigate Eleanor’s journey while still paying respect to the seriousness of the horrors endured.
But Squibb is absolutely wonderful from beginning to end. She plays Eleanor not as a cartoonish lovable crank, but as a complicated woman who has the ability to wound people with her words, which she deploys like a defensive mechanism. You get the sense that being her friend—as Bessie was for all those years—takes work, even though it’s ultimately a joy.
And joy is basically what everyone feels when Squibb is in the room. Her recent resurgence is a cap on a path that already seemed improbable when she was Oscar-nominated for Nebraska in 2014 after a long career with less flashy roles. With Eleanor it looks like Squibb might be in the running for a nod again, and we can’t wait to see more of her.
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