‘Eleanor the Nice’ evaluate: A lie spirals in Johansson’s directorial debut

There’s exactly one shocking second in Scarlett Johansson’s function directorial debut “Eleanor the Nice,” written by Tory Kamen. It’s the impetus for your complete drama that unfolds on this movie, and it feels genuinely dangerous — a taboo that will probably be exhausting for this movie to resolve. But, every thing that unfolds round this second is solely predictable.

Additionally unsurprising? That star June Squibb’s heat, humorous and barely spiky efficiency elevates the wobbly materials and tentative route. If Johansson nails something, it’s in permitting the 95-year-old Squibb to shine in solely her second starring position (the primary being final 12 months’s action-comedy “Thelma”). For any flaws or faults of “Eleanor the Nice” — and there are some — Squibb nonetheless may make you cry, even should you don’t need to.

That’s the great half about “Eleanor the Nice,” which is a bit skinny and treacly, regardless of its high-wire premise. The record-scratch startle that jump-starts the dramatic arc happens when Eleanor (Squibb) is attempting to determine what to do with herself at a Manhattan Jewish neighborhood heart after just lately relocating from Florida. Her lifelong greatest pal and later-in-life roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) has just lately died, so Eleanor has moved in along with her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), in New York Metropolis.

Harried Lisa sends Eleanor off to the JCC for a choir class, however the impulsive and feisty nonagenarian pooh-poohs the Broadway singing and as an alternative follows a pleasant face right into a assist group — for Holocaust survivors, she’s alarmed to find. But placed on the spot once they ask her to share her story of survival, Eleanor shares Bessie’s private historical past of escaping a Polish focus camp as an alternative, with horrific particulars she realized from her pal over sleepless nights of tortured reminiscences.

Eleanor’s lie may have been a small deception that performed out over one afternoon, by no means to be spoken of once more if she simply ghosted the common assembly, however there’s a wrinkle: an NYU pupil, Nina (Erin Kellyman), who needs to profile Eleanor for her journalism class. Eleanor initially makes the fitting selection, declining to take part, earlier than making the fallacious one, calling Nina and welcoming her over when her personal grandson doesn’t present up for Shabbat dinner. Thus begins a friendship constructed on a lie, and we all know the place that is going.

Nina and Eleanor proceed their relationship past its journalistic origins as a result of they’re each lonely and in mourning: Eleanor for Bessie, and Nina for her mom, additionally a latest loss. They each wrestle to attach with their quick households, Eleanor with terminally criticized daughter Lisa, and Nina with Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), her TV anchor father, paralyzed with grief over the demise of his spouse. And they also discover an unlikely pal in one another, for lunches and bat mitzvah crashing and journeys to Coney Island.

Eleanor decides to have a bat mitzvah herself, claiming she by no means had one because of the warfare (the truth is that she transformed for marriage), nevertheless it feels principally like a tool for a giant dramatic explosion of a revelation. It additionally serves the aim of justifying Eleanor’s well-intentioned deception with classes from the Torah.

It’s exhausting to abdomen her continued mendacity, which is maybe why the script retains her principally out of the assist group — the place the comparability to the true survivors could be an excessive amount of to bear — and within the confines of a friendship with a university pupil far faraway from that actuality. Johansson additionally makes the selection to flash again to Bessie’s recounting of her life story when Eleanor is talking, virtually as if she’s channeling her pal and her ache. The said intent is to share Bessie’s story when she not can, and surprisingly, everybody accepts this, maybe as a result of Squibb is just too endearing to remain mad at.

Johansson’s route is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to surprise why this explicit script spoke to her. Although it’s morally complicated and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep sufficient into the nuance right here, choosing surface-level feelings. It’s Squibb’s efficiency and interesting display screen presence that allow this all to work — if it does. Kellyman is terrific reverse Squibb, however this unconventional friendship story is the form of slight human curiosity story that slips out of your consciousness virtually as quickly because it has made its temporary impression.

Walsh is a Tribune Information Service movie critic.