‘Ella McCay’ Review

To say I hated ‘Ella McCay’ from the first five minutes would be an exaggeration, but only slightly. When Julie Kavner’s narrator opens the movie by saying just how crazy she is about the titular protagonist, I knew this was the kind of patronizing film that will tell you exactly what to feel and when to feel it.

James L. Brooks’s ‘Ella McCay’ is baffling and out-of-touch, set as it is in the supposedly happy days of the 2008 financial crisis, desperate to illicit any cheap emotion with all the subtlety of Jeb Bush imploring a crowd to please clap at a campaign rally.

Emma Mackie stars as ‘Ella McCay’, an idealistic policy wonk Lieutenant Governor whose world is upended when her boss, the beloved Governor Bill (Albert Brooks) accepts a position as Secretary of the Interior, leaving her to become Governor for the next fourteen months. Ella cannot celebrate landing her dream job, however, because at just that moment her personal life is threatening her professional future, with her philandering father (Woody Harrelson) re-entering her life hoping to gain her forgiveness and a reporter seeking to run a story about Ella using government facilities to have marital relations with her husband (Jack Lowden).

As I watched the movie, I got to wondering: when was the last time James L. Brooks spoke to another human being? Nothing depicted in ‘Ella McCay’ is how real people talk, or how real people behave. But that’s because these characters aren’t real people, they are flat one note cartoons wearing human flesh. The good guys are good and the bad guys are bad, everybody shocking in their transparency, and the heavy-handed music will further cue you up when it’s time to be sad, be happy, or laugh.

The more Brooks tried to get me to fall in love with a character, quirks and all, the more I hated them. I don’t like being told how to feel, especially when I’m being told in the most treacly, try-hard way imaginable.

Why is this movie set in 2008? The obvious answer is that Brooks wanted to set his story in the world of politics without having to deal with the Trump-era anger and polarization. But why set it during the greatest financial crisis of the last 100 years? It’s not like we see anybody struggling financially in the wake of that crisis; is Brooks so disconnected from the economic realities of the average American to think this is a charming time to look back upon? And as much as he might want this movie to be in 2008, the audience is firmly, regrettably, seated in 2025 and we’ve seen too much to so willingly sympathize with a flawed politician who, gosh darn it, is trying her best and has the tousled hair to prove it.

Beyond the sanitizing of the political landscape, there are so many parts of this story that feel written for a different era. In one scene that feels ripped from a 1980s teen comedy, Ella accidentally eats a cookie laced with – gasp – marijuana. This moment is made all the more confounding by the narrator letting the audience know that Ella was vehemently against legalizing marijuana of course, seemingly ignorant to the fact that legalizing weed is wildly popular across ideologies. It is just another example of how oblivious Brooks feels to a modern audience.

I hated the cloying narration, I hated the nonstop moralizing, I hated the overly sentimental moments designed to make people cry. I hated how bad Ella is at her job, and yet we’re told firmly that no, no, no. We don’t understand. Her inability to get anything done is actually because she’s simply too good and everybody else is jealous of her.

The movie ends, inevitably, with a literal round of applause for our plucky heroine, Ella McCay, and I was left with two major questions: what was the point and who was this for? I don’t know that I’ll ever get an answer to the former, but for the latter question I can at least say confidently that the answer is not me.

Ella McCay
Rated PG-13 for strong language, some sexual material and drug content.
Running Time: 1 hour and 55 minutes

Director James L. Brooks
Writers James L. Brooks
Stars Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lowden, Kumail Nanjiani, Ayo Edebiri, Julie Kavner, Spike Fearn, Rebecca Hall, Albert Brooks, Woody Harrelson
Rating PG-13
Running Time 115 Minutes
Genres Comedy, Drama