Johansson

There’s precisely one surprising moment in Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut “Eleanor the Great,” written by Tory Kamen. It’s the impetus for the entire drama that unfolds in this film, and it feels genuinely risky — a taboo that will be hard for this film to resolve. Yet, everything that unfolds around this moment is entirely predictable.

Also unsurprising? That star June Squibb’s warm, humorous and slightly spiky performance elevates the wobbly material and tentative direction. If Johansson nails anything, it’s in allowing the 95-year-old Squibb to shine in only her second starring role (the first being last year’s action-comedy “Thelma”). For any flaws or faults of “Eleanor the Great” — and there are some — Squibb still might make you cry, even if you don’t want to.

That’s the good part about “Eleanor the Great,” which is a bit thin and treacly, despite its high-wire premise. The record-scratch startle that jump-starts the dramatic arc occurs when Eleanor (Squibb) is trying to figure out what to do with herself at a Manhattan Jewish community center after recently relocating from Florida. Her lifelong best friend and later-in-life roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) has recently died, so Eleanor has moved in with her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), in New York City.

Harried Lisa sends Eleanor off to the JCC for a choir class, but the impulsive and feisty nonagenarian pooh-poohs the Broadway singing and instead follows a friendly face into a support group — for Holocaust survivors, she’s alarmed to discover. Yet put on the spot when they ask her to share her story of survival, Eleanor shares Bessie’s personal history of escaping a Polish concentration camp instead, with horrific details she learned from her friend over sleepless nights of tortured memories.

Eleanor’s lie could have been a small deception that played out over one afternoon, never to be spoken of again if she just ghosted the regular meeting, but there’s a wrinkle: an NYU student, Nina (Erin Kellyman), who wants to profile Eleanor for her journalism class. Eleanor initially makes the right choice, declining to participate, before making the wrong one, calling Nina and inviting her over when her own grandson doesn’t show up for Shabbat dinner. Thus begins a friendship built on a lie, and we know where this is going.

Nina and Eleanor continue their relationship beyond its journalistic origins because they’re both lonely and in mourning: Eleanor for Bessie, and Nina for her mother, also a recent loss. They both struggle to connect with their immediate families, Eleanor with terminally criticized daughter Lisa, and Nina with Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), her TV anchor father, paralyzed with grief over the death of his wife. And so they find an unlikely friend in each other, for lunches and bat mitzvah crashing and trips to Coney Island.

Eleanor decides to have a bat mitzvah herself, claiming she never had one due to the war (the reality is that she converted for marriage), but it feels mostly like a device for a big dramatic explosion of a revelation. It also serves the purpose of justifying Eleanor’s well-intentioned deception with lessons from the Torah.

It’s hard to stomach her continued lying, which is perhaps why the script keeps her mostly out of the support group — where the comparison to the real survivors would be too much to bear — and in the confines of a friendship with a college student far removed from that reality. Johansson also makes the choice to flash back to Bessie’s recounting of her life story when Eleanor is speaking, almost as if she’s channeling her friend and her pain. The stated intent is to share Bessie’s story when she no longer can, and surprisingly, everyone accepts this, perhaps because Squibb is too endearing to stay mad at.

Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotions. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enable this all to work — if it does. Kellyman is terrific opposite Squibb, but this unconventional friendship tale is the kind of slight human interest story that slips from your consciousness almost as soon as it has made its brief impression.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

For her seventh time hosting “Saturday Night Live” (the most times ever for a woman, NBC says), actor Scarlett Johansson closed the show’s historic 50th season.

It was a night that didn’t deliver any news on the rumors that Johansson’s husband, Colin Jost of “Weekend Update,” or his co-host Michael Che, would be leaving the show. Instead, the two engaged in their joke exchange ritual, and multiple guest stars showed up in sketches, including Mike Myers, Gina Gershon and Emily Ratajkowski in a video piece, and musical guest Bad Bunny.

Johansson did her usual ace job throughout the show, bringing her crisp delivery to sketches about a New York morning show where puns about hard-news stories land very badly, a Please Don’t Destroy video about a vacation flight to Newark Airport (it also lands badly), and a barroom sketch about two men (Marcello Hernández and Bad Bunny) who commiserate in Spanish about the terrible relationships they’re in with characters played by Johansson and Ego Nwodim.

The trio of sketches were followed by another video chapter in the “Bowen Yang’s Not Gay” series, in which Johansson has an affair with Yang before finding out how many other women he’s having sex with, including Gershon, Ratajkowski and cast members Nwodim and Heidi Gardner.

After a strong “Weekend Update” finale featuring Johansson in the joke exchange, the show took a hard dive with four sketches in a row that just didn’t work. There was a very dated and awkward elevator sketch about Mike Myers running into Kanye West (now Ye, played by Kenan Thompson), one about intimacy coordinators who don’t know how lesbians have sex, a TV interview panel in which female actors get asked more personal questions than their male co-star, and a gross-out season-ender about Victorian women eating disgusting foods including eels and BLTs (bunnies and little turtles).

On top of the bad run of sketches, Johansson was cut off while giving a tribute to Lorne Michaels as the show ended on broadcast and Peacock with no closing credits or cast hugs (the full goodnights were later posted online). That’s no fault of Johansson (who received a bouquet of roses and a kiss from her husband before that goodbye snafu), but it was a sloppy way to end an otherwise strong season of TV featuring a host who’s always proved solid.

Musical guest Bad Bunny, who appeared in the bar and Newark airport sketches, performed “NUEVAYoL” and “PERFuMITO NUEVO” with RaiNao.

The majority of Season 50’s cold opens have leaned on James Austin Johnson’s uncanny President Trump impression, and the finale followed suit. The president’s recent Middle East trip was the topic, with Trump having some friend time with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Emil Wakim). “We are vibing,” Trump said, “dipping our fingers into various goops and spreads,” although he says he ended up eating at a mobile McDonald’s set up for him nearby. Trump addressed the $400-million plane he wants to accept from Qatar (“It’s a pre-bribe”), saying he prefers it to flying an American plane. “No thanks, sonny. Have you seen what’s going on … screen is blank. Newark!” Trump narrated himself breaking the fourth wall by going out into the audience and commenting on the attractiveness of women in the front rows and promised audiences they wouldn’t forget him while “SNL” goes on summer hiatus. “I’m everywhere, even in your dreams, like the late, great Freddy Krueger. See you in the fall if we still have a country, right? It’s a coin toss.”

In her monologue, Johansson led the cast in a song with lyrics about the show set to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” “Sing us a song, it’s your monologue / sing us a song tonight. / ‘Cause we’ve made 50 years of great memories / every Saturday Night.” At one point it looked like Joel himself might join in when Johansson announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Joel… wrote this song!” The host took audience questions while still singing and jokes were made about a surprised Sarah Sherman finding out she’s leaving the show (it was a joke). The cast (with Jost and Che absent) concluded the song with, “The 50th season is through / it lasted forever / we did it together / and we got to spend it with you.”

Best sketch of the night: Let’s go home for some soup made from cow feet

Two men (Hernandez and Bad Bunny) on dates at a bar with women they don’t particularly want to be with (Nwodim and Johansson) get into a fight at their girlfriends’ urging, but instead they tell each other in Spanish about their problems and become friends. The two realize they’re both attracted to volatile relationships and will probably end up back in bed with the women they should break up with. The subtitles are on point and the attempts by the girlfriends to chime in with Spanish (“Nipple crazy cafeteria!”) also work nicely. For some reason, a couple of men (Andrew Dismukes and Johnson) sit at another table and serve as the sketch’s Greek chorus.

Also good: ‘Is something going on at Newark?’

The Please Don’t Destroy boys are visited by Johansson, who asks why they’re so down. “Are you sad the season’s over and you only did like two videos?” she asks. The actor invites them to fly first class with her and a Lonely Island-style rap video is interspersed with the reality of the situation: They’re on a very bad flight to Newark airport, which has been having some problems. There are some great visual jokes like a prayer symbol on the overhead panel and a Microsoft blue screen of death on the TV panels. But then Bad Bunny shows up as an air traffic controller who helps save the day all alone and on his first day at work. It might say something that the two best sketches this week featured Johansson as well as Bad Bunny; he didn’t get a chance to host this season but did a great job in 2023.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: Did Lorne Michaels know about this?

Miss Eggy (Nwodim) returned with another fire monologue similar to the one from last month, but it was the traditional joke exchange, in which Jost and Che force each other to read racist and/or embarrassing material that is taken to new heights (lows?) each time. Jost was forced to tell the show’s producer, “Retire, bitch, let me run the show,” while Che was given the line, “I haven’t been that excited since I saw a white woman drinking unattended.” Jost had to ridicule rap feud master Kendrick Lamar and with Jost’s wife sitting next to him, Che was forced to apologize and say about his time on the show, “I’ve told thousands of jokes and gotten dozens of laughs,” and of Jost, “I love you.” But it was Jost who got the worst of it, getting tricked into saying the name Nick Kerr, son of Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, and applying lipstick to tell Michaels, “I’ll do anything to run this show.” If this is the last time we see Jost and Che as “Update” hosts, at least we’ll know they left no depths unplumbed.