Eleanor the Great: Or How To Headline a Movie When You’re Over 90

January 2026

 

Talk about a late bloomer...

 

June Squibb...

 

Has not one...

 

But two recent films...

 

In which she is the star...

 

Thelma....

And now Eleanor the Great...

 

At 96!

 

Not even Jane Fonda has pulled that off...

And she’s eight years younger...

 

And neither have any of the much more famous older female actresses...

We are so used to seeing...

Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith...

 

Oh wait...

 

The last two are dead...

And Dench is blind...

 

But Blythe Danner is still around...

And every once in a while we see Shirley MacLaine in something...

 

But only Helen Mirren manages to get top billing...

(See Goodbye June and Golda...)

And more on her soon...

 

But keep in mind...Squibb was 16 years old when Mirren was born...

And Mirren has been famous for a long time...

 

While Squibb was on no one’s radar screen until recently...

And she didn’t even appear in her first film until she was 60...

 

So where has she been all these years?

 

Well... mostly on and off Broadway...

When she wasn’t performing on cruise ships...

And as Santa’s helper at a shopping mall...

 

But after Woody Allen cast her in Alice in 1990...

She started to show up in small parts in TV shows and films...

 

But she was never the headliner...

 

Until now...

 

When she seems to be everywhere...

 

Showing up in Lost and Found in Cleveland and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead...

 

In addition to the films that feature her as the lead...

 

So hers is a great story of an actress who languished for decades...

And then made it big when she was over 90...

 

Only George Burns had that kind of career resurgence...

And he just played George Burns...

 

But Squibb’s character in Thelma...

While she proved deceptively formidable...

Mostly fell and couldn’t get up or had to roll herself out of bed...

So she was there to show us how awful it is to be in your 90s...

 

But Eleanor runs around New York City like she was 60...

Cooks dinner for Shabbat...

And seems pretty spry for an over 90-year-old...

 

And what a character...

Played to perfection by Squibb...

 

Eleanor is an old Jewish lady...

 

With an often too easy way with the truth...

 

Who can gut you like fish... if you happen to be her daughter...

 

But Scarlett Johansson in her directorial debut...

 

Has given Eleanor an interesting surrogate daughter, Nina...

Who is well played by Erin Kellyman...

As a young woman who is raw with grief from the loss of her mother...

 

And, of course, these two bond...

 

Because Eleanor has just lost her oldest and dearest friend...

 

Which leads her to do something she shouldn’t...

That ends up hurting Nina...

 

There is a Holocaust angle here...

And the fact that Eleanor’s ties to Judaism may not be what they seem...

 

But this film is really about grief...

And what it makes people do...

 

So it is a bit disappointing in the end...

Which feels unsatisfying...

 

As if Tory Kamen ...

Who wrote the screenplay...

Couldn’t quite figure out how to end this story...

 

So the scene with Nina’s father on TV...

Seems tacked-on...

In that way writers do when they can’t figure out how to bring an end to what they have written...

 

But the answer was staring Kamen right in the face...

 

And it had to do with how someone important to Eleanor...

Wanted the story of her grief to be remembered...

Because she wanted to believe her life had meaning...

 

And the stage was set for this in earlier scenes in this film...

But for some reason, Kamen and Johansson couldn’t see it...

 

Which is a shame, because Eleanor the Great is a fine film...

 

That could have ended with a bang ...

 

But instead finished with a whimper...

 

But until that ending...

 

Squibb showed why you shouldn’t underestimate a little old lady...

Who will not be deterred...

 

No matter what...

 

So you might want to get out of her way...

 

Because it looks like after 90...

 

You stop giving a f...ck...

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And that kind of looks like fun...

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