CANNES, France — It’s not easy for a Marvel star to avoid being the center of attention, but Scarlett Johansson seemed to be using every ounce of her being to step out of the spotlight — even as an entire theater rose to applaud her entrance at the Cannes Film Festival Tuesday afternoon.
The actress was at the world premiere of her directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great,” but seemed determined to make sure this day was entirely about her film’s delightful 95-year-old star, June Squibb.
Even as they were filming, Johansson told the crowd, she’d had a vision of this very moment. “I said, ‘If I do my job right, my dream is to see June on the Croisette in Cannes,’ and here we are,” she said. “So this really is a dream come true.”
Squibb, who had arrived in a sparkly floral caftan holding Johansson’s hand, couldn’t stop beaming. She had last been to Cannes 12 years ago for Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” in a supporting role that earned her an Oscar nomination — and there’s already talk that this film, only the second lead role of her career after last year’s action-comedy “Thelma,” might have her competing with the likes of Jennifer Lawrence for best actress.
The film opens in the modest Florida retirement community where two Jewish best friends of 70 years, Squibb’s Eleanor Morgenstern and Rita Zohar’s Bessie Stern, share an apartment, sleeping side-by-side in twin beds. Eleanor is a very funny spitfire and compulsive liar, who sees nothing wrong with skillfully dressing down a teenage grocery-store clerk to get Bessie the kosher pickles she wants, or fibbing about Bessie’s family donating a wing to the hospital to get her better care.
That lifelong friendship, which also includes sharing stories of the darkest times in their lives over sleepless nights in their kitchen, is the throughline of Johansson’s movie, which is essentially about what happens when you lose the most important person in your life. When Eleanor loses Bessie and moves in with her adult daughter (Jessica Hecht) in New York, she finds herself starting over. In one fateful moment, having stumbled into a support group for Holocaust survivors, she tells one of Bessie’s stories as her own as a way to remember her friend. But there are many sweet, and dark, twists in store. It’s in that group that Eleanor strikes up a wonderful and unlikely friendship with a college journalism student (newcomer Erin Kellyman), who wants to write an article about her. Nina, who recently lost her mother, is the first person Eleanor’s found who might help fill the void that Bessie left, and soon Eleanor is in so deep that she keeps compounding her lies.
More than a few times during the premiere, a woman next to me whispered, “Oh, Eleanor, no!” As the consequences of Eleanor’s lies finally came to bear, the theater echoed with sobs and sniffles.
Johansson’s film is at the festival as part of the prestigious Un Certain Regard competition for first- and second-time filmmakers, alongside debut films from fellow actors-turned-directors Kristen Stewart and Harris Dickinson. Judging from the abundant laughter and crying in the theater, there’s a commercial audience for this movie. It just doesn’t feel as though it belongs alongside the more daring, visually inventive fare that one associates with Cannes.
Indiewire’s Kate Erbland found the film “funny” and “sweet” but with wild and “often baffling” tonal shifts, as it mixes the romps of Eleanor and Nina’s budding friendship with Bessie’s harrowing Holocaust stories. “It’s a little predictable, a little bizarre, a little funny, and very sad, but it’s also an ambitious swing at what movies can still be (and what sort of stars can populate them),” Erbland writes.
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it “sentimental,” “earnest” and an “awards-season wannabe,” none of it in a good way. Lovia Gyarkye of the Hollywood Reporter was mixed, writing, “It’s a bold premise that could have worked better.” And Gregory Ellwood of the Playlist wrote that the script, from another first-timer, Tory Kamen, simply has too many plotlines. Visually, Ellwood wrote, he was also hoping for more. “Considering the lineage of filmmakers Johansson has worked with over her 25-year career, [is it wrong] we dared to expect something more?”
The audience, though, sincerely loved it, and Squibb basked in a six-minute standing ovation, with roars of “brava!” rising from the orchestra seats to the balcony.
Squibb is in the middle of an amazing late-career renaissance. And, while “Eleanor the Great” is an independent movie of roughly the same scale as “Thelma,” it’s likely to attract the attention of Oscar voters curious to see Johansson’s first film.
After giving Squibb and Kellyman huge, long hugs, Johansson took the microphone and told the crowd that she felt “naked” showing the movie, because it had been such an intimate shoot, but was so grateful to present it to the world. “It’s about Jewish identity, it’s about friendship, but most importantly it’s about forgiveness, which is something we could use a lot more of these days.”
Mostly, though, she just held Squibb’s hand and smiled, hearing the crowd roar for her star. She had been the director, but it was Squibb’s night.
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