Review of 'Eleanor The Great': A Lie Spirals in the debut as Johansson director

There is precisely a surprising moment in the debut as director of Scarlett Johansson “Eleanor The Great”, written by Tory Kamen. It is the impetus for all the drama that takes place in this film, and feels really risky, a taboo that will be difficult to solve for this film. However, everything that develops at this time is completely predictable.

Is it not surprising too? The warm, humorous and slightly pointed performance of the June Squibb star elevates the staggering material and the attempt direction. If Johansson nails something, it is allowing the 95 -year -old squying to shine alone in his second leading role (the first is the action comedy last year “Thelma”). For any defect or failures of “Eleanor The Great”, and there are some, Squibb could still make you cry, even if you don't want.

That is the good part of “Eleanor The Great”, which is a bit thin and in a bad mood, despite its wire premise. The scare record that prevents the dramatic arch occurs when Eleanor (Squibb) is trying to discover what to do with itself in a center of the Jewish community of Manhattan after recently moved from Florida. His best life and roommate friend later in Life Bessie (Rita Zohar) has recently died, so Eleanor moved with her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Heht), in New York City.

The harassed Lisa sends Eleanor to the JCC for a choir class, but the impulsive and non-agenarium fighter Pooh-Pohs The Broadway singing and, on the other hand, follows a friendly face in a support group: for the survivors of the Holocaust, he was alarmed to discover. However, in the place when they ask him to share his survival story, Eleanor shares Bessie's personal history to escape a Polish concentration camp, with horrible details that he learned from her friend during the nights of insomnia of tortured memories.

Eleanor's lie could have been a small deception that took place during an afternoon, to never speak to him again if only the regular meeting is ghost, but there is a wrinkle: a Nyu student, Nina (Erin Kellyman), who wants to outline Eleanor for his class of journalism. Initially, Eleanor makes the right decision, denying to participate, before eating the wrong, calling Nina and inviting her when her own grandson does not appear for Shabbat dinner. Thus begins a friendship based on a lie, and we know where this is going.

Nina and Eleanor continue their relationship beyond their journalistic origins because they are alone and mourning: Eleanor for Bessie and Nina for their mother, also a recent loss. Both struggle to connect with their immediate families, Eleanor with their daughter criticized finishing Lisa, and Nina with Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), her television presenter, paralyzed with pain for the death of her wife. And then they find an unlikely friend in each other, for lunches and bats that crash and travel to Coney Island.

Eleanor decides to have a batzvah, claiming that he never had one due to war (the reality is that he became for marriage), but he feels mainly as a device for a great dramatic explosion of a revelation. It also serves to justify Eleanor's well -intentioned deception with lessons of the Torah.

It is difficult to support its continuous lying, so the script maintains it mainly outside the support group, where the comparison with the true survivors would be too much to endure, and in the limits of a friendship with a university student far away from that reality. Johansson also makes the decision to return to Bessie's story of the history of her life when Eleanor is talking, almost as if she were channeling her friend and her pain. The declared intention is to share Bessie's story when he can no longer, and surprisingly, everyone accepts this, perhaps because Squibb is too endearing to stay angry.

Johansson's address is useful if not remarkable, and one has to ask why this particular script spoke to him. Although it is morally complex and of modest reach, it does not immerse itself deep enough in the nuance here, opting for emotions at the surface level. It is the performance of Squibb and the attractive presence on the screen that allows all this to work, if it does. Kellyman is excellent opposite to Squibb, but this story of unconventional friendship is the type of history of human interest that comes out of his conscience almost as soon as his brief impression has caused.

Walsh is a film critic of the Tribune news service.