‘Eleanor the Great’ - Review
A 94-year-old woman who steals a Holocaust survivor's story should be irredeemable, yet Eleanor the Great finds a way to make its titular protagonist sympathetic. Maybe it’s because we recognize her particular brand of theft.
After her friend Bessie passes away, Eleanor Morgenstein’s (June Squibb) loneliness becomes so unbearable that when she's mistaken for a Holocaust survivor at a support group meeting, she goes along with it. She retells Bessie's story like it’s her own, describing camps she never experienced and losses she never endured. The other survivors embrace her, a journalist wants to profile her story, and for the first time since losing her closest friend, Eleanor feels seen.
Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, is very timely; it comes at a time when our collective relationship with tragedy and consumption is fraught. Whether it's the constant exposure to global atrocities via social media or something deeper, our collective ability to engage with suffering that does not directly impact us feels artificially deformed and stunted. Sometimes this manifests as numbing apathy, but more recently I’ve been noticing a lot of Eleanor's particular brand of self-protection: unintentionally making ourselves the protagonists of other people's suffering
Take the critical reception The Voice of Hind Rajab this year for example. The film itself is meticulously crafted, focused entirely on the six-year-old Palestinian girl's final phone calls from a car surrounded by Israeli tanks with her family already dead around her. The filmmakers refuse to show her body or take advantage of her story by dramatizing her final moments. Instead, the entire structure is built around preserving her dignity, letting her voice carry the weight of witness. Despite this, the most prominent reviews center on descriptions of how hard the writers cried, how the audience reacted, and how long the standing ovations lasted. The twenty-minute standing ovation is a metric of caring, as if duration could erase the pain. Hind receives a paragraph while our reactions fill pages. The child whose death sparked the film gets reduced to a footnote in the story of our emotions.
Palestinian journalists have been documenting this pattern for years, watching their work get repackaged as someone else's awakening; their deaths become opportunities for others' moral performance. Mohammed El-Kurd writes about the "perfect victim," how Palestinians must die correctly to earn Western sympathy, how their suffering must be palatable enough to generate the right kind of concern. Palestinian reporters risk everything to tell their stories, only to watch Western journalists collect prizes for discovering their work. It’s a theft that continues because it serves everyone except those being stolen from.
Eleanor the Great is at its most compelling when it serves us an inspection of how we consume and redistribute other people's catastrophes, how tragedy has become a currency in our attention economy, and how we all perform some version of Eleanor's theft, just guarded behind therapy-speak and Instagram infographics. On paper, Eleanor’s theft is reprehensible, but somehow she finds redemption. Her lie works because it’s one we witness and sometimes partake in daily. Eleanor’s audiences need her to be a survivor because it makes them feel generous. The journalist needs the testimony for her project. Eleanor's daughter needs her mother occupied with something other than complaints. Everyone benefits from the fiction except Bessie, whose actual suffering becomes someone else's social capital.
This is precisely what happens with Palestine, with Sudan, with every tragedy that enters our cultural focus. We perform proximity to pain because pain makes us visible in an economy that rewards feeling over action. We center our own reactions because reactions feel more manageable than actually dealing with the horror. We make ourselves protagonists in the face of other people's extinctions because we can’t do anything else with our powerlessness.
Perhaps Eleanor is better than us. While we dress our appropriation in the language of solidarity and awareness, Eleanor simply takes what she needs to be seen. She doesn't disguise her theft as a way to serve some higher purpose. It’s not performative; she just wants to process her friend’s death and understands that borrowed trauma works better than none in a world that worships suffering.
It’s terrible but the alternative should never be silence. People need to know what's happening in Gaza. The world needs to understand the magnitude of loss in Palestine. Everyone needs to see beyond the careful framing of media that makes atrocity palatable. But there's a difference between amplifying voices and becoming the voice. There’s a distinction between sharing stories and stealing them. Palestinian journalists show us this difference in their work: how they name the dead before describing their own feelings, how they document what happened before explaining what it means, and how they keep the story centered on those living it rather than those watching it.
Eleanor can't maintain these distinctions. She's too hungry for the warmth that comes from mattering and too desperate for connection to care about unpacking the ethics of her lie. We are all Eleanor in our way, performing proximity and making ourselves central to horrors we can barely comprehend. The question isn't whether we'll stop. The hunger that drives Eleanor drives us all, whether we like it or not. The question is whether we can recognize the theft for what it is and whether we can resist the temptation to make ourselves the story. We must learn to work to put an end to injustice without performing. Eleanor shows us how hard this is. Sometimes we don’t notice how natural the theft feels when loneliness meets tragedy. It’s extremely easy to mistake our own need for connection with actual solidarity.