Scarlett Johansson’s “Eleanor the Great,” is about the Holocaust and strong Jewish women, but more than anything, it’s about grief. The first trailer came out this week and it looks absolutely incredible.
In the movie, Johansson’s directorial debut, the great Oscar-nominated June Squibb, who is Jewish, plays Eleanor Morgenstein. In the trailer, she’s charmingly sassy. When her neighbor Clarice taunts her, she gives as good as she gets and makes a saucy remark about shtupping the woman’s husband. When her cab driver tells her he lives in Staten, she shares her condolences. And when her daughter (Jessica Hecht) tells her she signed her up for a class at the JCC, she tells her the morgue sounds like a better alternative.
But beyond her brave and brazen facade, Eleanor is reeling from the loss of her best friend, Bessie, played by Israeli award-winning actress Rita Zohar. Bessie was a Holocaust survivor, and she and Eleanor lived together in fond and joyful companionship for 11 years, spending their days people watching on the beach in Florida.
“When you live with someone for that long,” a heartbroken Eleanor says in the trailer, “you forget where you end and they begin.”
When she enters the JCC in Manhattan — where she’s moved to live with her daughter and grandson after Bessie’s death — instead of going to that aforementioned dreaded class, she finds herself drawn elsewhere. She joins a support group for survivors, and it’s there that she finds a way to keep Bessie’s memory alive — even if it is stealing her harrowing story of survival and passing it off as her own.
She also meets a kindred spirit, similarly shaken by grief — a young college student (Erin Kellyman) who wants to write a story about Eleanor’s — or rather, Bessie’s — story of survival. Like Eleanor, she’s dealing with an unimaginable loss — that of her mother — and over shared New York slices and wintertime visits to Coney Island, the two form an unlikely friendship.
But of course, the truth of Eleanor’s deception threatens their connection.
For the creators of the movie, Jewish grandmothers were at the heart of their craft. Screenwriter Tory Kamen was inspired by her own Jewish grandmother who never became embroiled in an Eleanor-like scandal, but who did, at the tender age of 95, start her life anew in Manhattan after living in Florida. Like Squibb’s character, she dealt with loneliness and feeling unmoored.
As for Johansson, she dedicated this film to her Jewish grandmother, Dorothy, “a very independent, vivacious Jewish woman who was involved in tenant activism, loved the city and enjoyed participating in all the free art programs that New York had to offer,” she shared in a press release.
“Eleanor the Great” looks like a charmingly funny, complex, heartbreaking and magical coming-of-age in your 90s tale — the kind of fascinating story that all our bubbes deserve.
“Eleanor the Great” is coming to theaters on Sept. 26, 2025.
