‘Eleanor the Great’ is a crowd-pleasing comedy with a queasy Holocaust concept

Photo by Anne Joyce. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

By PJ Grisar September 25, 2025

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There are millions of Holocaust stories, and many involve dissembling.

In France and the Netherlands, the underground forged fake passports. Mothers hid their children with gentiles and even in convents, where they learned Christian prayers. In a world where living truthfully meant certain death, Jews did what they had to to survive. And so the question of identity — mistaken or manufactured — in Shoah-related films like Monsieur Klein and The Man in the Glass Booth, has long been a rich vein for drama.

Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, has a vogue-ish variation in mind. We see it at play in Dear Evan Hansen, the adapted-for-streaming stories of cancer scammers Belle Gibson and Elisabeth Finch and, most trenchantly, in 2022’s Not Okay, where a young woman pretends to have survived a mass shooting. Together, they ask: What if someone pretended to be a victim, not for reasons of survival, but for human connection?

Eleanor Morgenstein, an indomitable June Squibb, is a 94-year-old widow who has recently lost her roommate and best friend, Bessie Stern (Israeli actor and childhood survivor Rita Zohar, who brings a poignant gravitas).

Bessie survived the Holocaust, hiding in a closet of non-Jewish neighbors before being deported to Auschwitz with her mother and brother. The rest of her family was murdered. After Bessie’s death, Eleanor moves from Florida to live with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) in Manhattan. At the JCC where she plans to attend a singing class, she is mistaken for a new member of a survivors’ support group. Encouraged to share her story, she ends up recounting Bessie’s.

The lie takes on a larger life when Nina (Erin Kellyman), an NYU student observing the group for a journalism class, picks Eleanor to profile. After initial resistance from Eleanor, the two bond over their shared grief — Nina’s mother, a Jewish photographer, died six months before they met — and events snowball from there. Nina’s dad, a news anchor played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, wants to feature Eleanor’s story, as she embarks on her adult bat mitzvah, on his show.

Eleanor — not above the odd white lie — is never quite comfortable inserting herself in Bessie’s biography. But she is reassured by the parsha the rabbi selects for her bat mitzvah: That of Jacob and Esau.

She marvels that Jacob faced no consequences for passing as his brother to receive his birthright, apart from becoming the “revered patriarch of our religion.”

The rabbi concludes that deceit isn’t always bad, “if the intention is pure.”

This, I fear, is credulous. The movie is too forgiving of the lie, because it in part believes the story of the Holocaust belongs to the world.

Eleanor’s breaking of an ultimate taboo is readily overlooked for her lovable lack of a filter, her loneliness and her need to share her friend’s experience.

Somehow Johansson, doing steady if unremarkable work with a freshman script by Tory Kamen, has delivered a life-affirming comedy built around memories of mass death. She manages it by signifying Jewishness —  Eleanor’s Shabbat ritual, kitschy Judaica and shopping for kosher pickles, a bat mitzvah girl on the bimah — while not dwelling on the hate that animated the Shoah or the consequences of appropriating its history. Johansson has received credit, often as a point of contrast to pro-Palestinian Jewish celebrities, for casting real survivors in the JCC support group scenes, but those performers aren’t given an opportunity to offer testimony, only to hear Eleanor’s, which is false.

The film insists it is about grief, but its heavy hand swipes aside more provocative and pressing questions baked into its conceit.

Survivors like those we see in the group are dying. Who will tell their stories — who is allowed to? Who, after decades of Holocaust education that pushed for a universal parable from the industrialized slaughter of millions, gets to keep this memory alive? As survivor and Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész put it while writing about cinematic depictions of the genocide, “Who owns Auschwitz?”

More often than not, Eleanor the Great is interested in the universal view: the grief we suffer through but rarely discuss. The particulars of the Holocaust and how it and other genocides ripple through generations, are sidelined. (This is especially odd given that Ejifior’s character, who makes the grief theme explicit for a forthcoming series on his news show, is Black and likely has both firsthand and epigenetic trauma of his own.)

Once again the Holocaust is claimed for an ecumenical lesson, this time about how loss can make us selfish. Eliding the historic hate that motivated the Shoah — assuming viewers know its specifics — endangers memory that has proven, with the mainstreaming of Holocaust revisionism online, to be fragile. Lying, even with someone else’s real history, has implications the film flinches from to make way for another quip from Squibb.

In a story of zakhor, remembrance, by way of stolen trauma, we have in Bessie the Prototypical Holocaust Survivor the world now imagines: an elderly person with an arm tattoo whose resilience might be called inspiring. Her narrative is one Eleanor, who we learn converted as an adult to marry her husband, can feel ownership of by association and all others might by way of saturation.

It’s a story that those watching nightly news might find instructive a la Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning or Anne Frank’s “in spite of everything…” How long before the horrors Bessie faced become so generic that they cease to be a Jewish story, instead morphing into a historical warning that might be warped to argue any cause, invoked to claim victimhood for those — vaccine skeptics, conservatives, Jan. 6 rioters — under no real threat.

In an early scene, a neighbor challenges Eleanor in a grocery store for echoing Bessie’s remark that Hitler stole her smile. She reacts defensively, saying she doesn’t need to have suffered herself to be “sad about the Holocaust.”

No one does. But with that sadness should come a reverence, a humility and an acknowledgement: It couldn’t have happened to anyone.