Obligatory confession: June Squibb can do no wrong.
I’m sure she’d somehow make grocery shopping a fascinating experience.
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| Now fast friends, Nina (Erin Kellyman) surprises Eleanor (June Squibb) with a nostalgic stroll to see what remains of the golden age of Brooklyn's famed Coney Island. |
But although Tory Kamen’s screenplay has plenty of lighter moments — with occasionally snarky one-liners well delivered by Squibb — the story itself is deeply poignant. Events unfold under the accomplished guidance of Scarlett Johansson, making an impressively sensitive feature directing debut.
The moral quandary here revolves around a crucial question: If a truth isn’t somebody else’s to tell, is it nonetheless a truth that should be revealed?
Eleanor (Squibb) and Bessie (Rita Zohar) share an apartment in a Florida retirement community. The story begins as they waken on an average morning, have breakfast, and then embark on another day. They have the comfortable — if mildly grumpy — camaraderie that bespeaks decades of friendship. Their lives are simple but enjoyably routine: greeting familiar faces, sparring with clerks and shopkeepers at nearby stores.
(Eleanor’s handling of a young stock boy, at their grocery store, is priceless.)
Then, suddenly, Bessie is gone.
Cast adrift and totally bereft, Eleanor — having lived in the Bronx for 40 years, back in the day — allows herself to be relocated to New York City, where she moves into an apartment with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and grandson Max (Will Price). Lisa is overly attentive, which frustrates Eleanor, long accustomed to taking care of herself. Although Max obviously loves and admires his grandmother, he’s too occupied with his own “stuff” to pay her much attention.
Believing it necessary to keep Eleanor engaged, Lisa enrolls her into a singing class at the local Jewish community center. Eleanor pokes her head in the doorway just long enough to hear a woman warble several stanzas of Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” (a bit on the nose, that), and bolts.
She’s “rescued” by another woman, who invites Eleanor to join her where a dozen or so similarly elderly men and women are seated in a circle. What Eleanor assumes is some sort of friendship meeting turns out to be a regular gathering of Holocaust survivors, who ease their ongoing torment by sharing their experiences with each other.
Embarrassed by being somewhere she doesn’t belong, when it comes Eleanor’s turn to talk, she hesitates ... and then relates what she must have heard hundreds of times from her departed friend Bessie, plagued by horrific memories in the middle of countless sleepless nights.
And claims these memories as her own.
