Eleanor the Great: What is Scarlett Johansson like as a director?

When director Scarlett Johansson took the reins of Eleanor the Great, a lot of spadework had already been done.

The script was written – by first-timer Tory Kamen - over 20 producers were in place and most important, playing the title role was Hollywood’s only 96-year-old, female A-Lister, June Squibb.

Squibb had just come off the hugely entertaining action-adventure Thelma, as a 90-year-old out for revenge in a wheelchair.

Well, I say “just come off”. She knocked off six more roles before she found time to play Eleanor, a nice Jewish woman sharing an LA apartment with her best friend Bessie.

But suddenly Bessie dies, and Eleanor has no choice but to join her daughter Lisa in New York.

Knowing how pig-headed her mother can be, Lisa sets her up in a flat and tells her the local Jewish Community Centre has plenty of activities.

If you thought modern teenagers invented the sarcastic eyeroll, you haven’t met Eleanor.

Grudgingly she goes downtown to check out an uplifting, age-appropriate choir, but she’s sidetracked by something far more interesting – a Holocaust survivors meeting. And before she knows it, she’s joined up.

The problem is Eleanor’s not actually a Holocaust survivor. In fact, she’s barely Jewish, if you want to be nit-picking. Not like her late best friend, Bessie, who got out of Poland by the skin of her teeth, and regularly regaled Eleanor with her war-stories.

But what turns from a harmless white lie to liven up a lonely afternoon into something else is when she meets a young journalism student called Nina. Nina wants to use Eleanor’s stories - really Bessie’s –for an article, partly to impress her father the TV journalist Roger.

Roger and Nina are still grieving the death of Nina’s mother, and this project may be the only way to get through to him.

Eleanor is torn. She wants to help young Nina – she and Bessie were huge fans of Roger, the sort of old-fashioned journalist that only exists these days in movies like Eleanor the Great.

But the longer she keeps up her survivor myth, the more likely the truth will come out.

Eleanor has another reason for claiming Bessie’s stories as her own – it’s a way of keeping them alive somehow.

Everything goes well to start with, for both Eleanor and Nina. Roger is impressed by his daughter’s writing, and he wants to take Eleanor’s so-called life story to a bigger audience.

A live interview on television? What could possibly go wrong?

And in many ways that could easily be the question behind Eleanor the Great. If you go by this rather bald summary of the setup, there doesn’t seem much to it, apart from Squibb’s undoubted charm.

But in fact, the secret weapon of the film is neither Squibb, nor even the script of Kamen, but the clean, focused direction by Johansson.

I’m not sure why I was surprised at how skillfully she tells a story that has more than one trap for the unwary. After all, Johansson’s spent three quarters of her life on a film set. There’s clearly nothing she doesn’t know about working with actors.

But she’s equally smart at negotiating a potentially tricky script. So, nicely done, far better than you’re expecting. And the only bad news is that, while big-deal movie stars like Johannson love to direct, and are often good at it, they generally quit after the first one or two.

Let’s face it, directing’s hard work. Wouldn’t you rather be paid far more for infinitely less? Yes, me too,