TIFF Review: The Quiet Force of Eleanor the Great

At last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Eleanor the Great arrived with the kind of pedigree that can invite easy cynicism: Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut, a major star stepping behind the camera to tell a modest, ostensibly intimate story about grief, friendship, and reinvention. What is surprising is not that the film is competent, but that it is so deliberately unshowy. Johansson directs without vanity. She does not overstate the material or strain for importance. Instead, she builds the film around silence, awkwardness, withheld feeling, and the small indignities of starting over late in life.

That sensibility serves June Squibb extraordinarily well. As Eleanor Morgenstein, Squibb gives a performance of rare precision: wry, prickly, intermittently imperious, and quietly devastated. She plays a woman in old age not as a repository of ready-made wisdom, but as someone still improvising, still protecting herself, still capable of self-deception. Squibb understands that loneliness can sharpen a person as much as it diminishes her, and her performance gives the film its pulse. Eleanor is funny, but never reduced to comic relief; wounded, but never sentimentalized.

The film’s emotional architecture rests on the relationships around her. Erin Kellyman’s Nina brings a different charge altogether—openness edged with uncertainty, youthful curiosity shadowed by her own grief. The connection between the two women is the film’s most delicate achievement. Johansson is wise enough not to force it into the usual symbolic arrangement of elder and acolyte, or mother and substitute daughter. Their bond is messier than that, shaped as much by projection and need as by tenderness. The film understands that intimacy is often built not on perfect honesty, but on mutual recognition imperfectly grasped.

Jessica Hecht, as Eleanor’s daughter Lisa, gives the film some of its most painful notes. In lesser hands, the daughter figure would exist merely to register concern or exasperation; here, Lisa becomes the site of a more complicated inquiry into obligation, frustration, and love worn thin by time. The mother-daughter dynamic is not overdramatized, which makes it sting more. The film recognizes how family affection can coexist with impatience, fatigue, and longstanding incomprehension.

And then there is Bessie Stern, played by Rita Zohar, whose presence lingers over the picture with unusual force. Bessie is not treated as a narrative device dispatched to set Eleanor’s transformation in motion. She remains, instead, the film’s haunting measure of what friendship can be: sustaining, formative, and not entirely recoverable after loss. In that sense, Eleanor the Great is as much about the afterlife of female friendship as it is about grief itself—about the ways women continue to live inside one another’s language, memory, and moral imagination.

Johansson’s most impressive instinct as a first-time director is her refusal to insist. She does not underline every emotional beat or decorate the film with false profundity. Her restraint gives the actors room to find the material from within, and it allows the film’s ideas—about aging, about memory, about the stories women inherit and carry for one another—to gather weight gradually rather than announce themselves. That patience is a form of confidence.

Eleanor the Great is, finally, a film about resilience, though not in the flattened, inspirational sense the word usually suggests. It is about endurance with rough edges still intact. It is about women at different stages of life trying, however imperfectly, to make meaning from loss, misunderstanding, and attachment. The film does not need to raise its voice to make itself felt. Its force lies in its quietness, in its trust that the accumulated pressures of ordinary feeling can be revelation enough.

It lingers for precisely that reason: not because it declares itself beautiful, but because it earns its beauty through tact, intelligence, and emotional control.

Parker’s Cut Movie Rating: