Ella McCay: A Feisty Young Woman in a Feel-Good Movie Stuck in Faux Nostalgia
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C+
The ironic thing about Ella McCay, James L. Brooks’ surprisingly slight politically themed comedy, is that it’s an aggressively feel-good movie that may leave you feeling bad.
The movie is about an energetic young woman (Emma Mackey) in 2008 looking to make the world a better place from inside the state governor’s office. There is no mention of Democrats or Republicans, nor of the then-new President.
Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) puts aside her misgivings at the marriage of Ella (Emma Mackey)
But even though the movie comes with a disclaimer, in the form of narration by Julie Kavner, saying about 2008, “Yes, there was a recession, but we still liked each other,” it’s little comfort to a viewer in 2025 that people were still nice then.
It prompts the question: Have things really changed that much in 17 years, that we’re practically a different species? The meanness in the air now seems to hammer noble intentions into dust. And it makes Ella McCay seem like an extinct species preserved in amber.
Read our chat with James L. Brooks, Jamie Lee Curtis and Albert Brooks
Brooks has been making crowd-pleasing TV and movies for more than half a century, back to when movie stars playing regular folk could go off to Washington or the State House armed with only a sense of decency and, yes, make the world a better place. People swallowed such cinematic comfort food whole then.
Impossibly idealistic in a cynical world, Ella McCay does at least seem true to its time. The movie’s idea of a career-threatening sex scandal is the governor of the unnamed state having “marital relations” with her spouse in an inappropriate but still private location. This would be about the same time that Republicans were having brain aneurysms over President Obama wearing a tan suit.
In fact, Ella McCay comes off like the pilot episode of a feel-good TV series. None of the characters are particularly well fleshed out, but don’t worry, we’ve got a whole season to make them believable. Oh wait, we don’t.
There are so many characters at play in the movie, the only constant is the young overachiever whose drive makes her a social outcast in school, which only increases her drive. Every other character has only one job (and one dimension), to support her or pretend to. It’s a first-rate cast of actors, all of whom seem to be trying very hard.
At the top of the supporters list is Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is a mother hen for her motherless niece. There’s also Ryan (Jack Lowden), a handsome, affable, supportive boyfriend-turned-husband, who seems to exist only for her.
On a dime, when the time comes (ie. when she inherits the job of governor of the unnamed state from the previous governor, another supporter, played by Albert Brooks), Ryan turns heel and begins using her coattails to build his own career. There is absolutely no hint of this aspect through the first act of the movie, other than that Aunt Helen never trusts him. Pro wrestlers adjust their roles less abruptly.
Another not-really-supportive character is Ella’s dad (Woody Harrelson), a skeevy philanderer whose stated intent to mend bridges dovetails with his estranged daughter’s sudden success. He spends the moving insisting he’s changed, though he hasn’t.
Finally, there’s Ella’s kid brother Casey (Spike Fearn), an agoraphobe computer nerd who’s used his skills to become rich running a gambling site from his pizza-box-strewn apartment. Nice kid, but you could remove his entire subplot and it wouldn’t change the movie a whit.
Maybe the next episode will be better. Oh, wait, I forgot. it’s a movie.
Ella McCay. Written and directed by James L. Brooks. Stars Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lowden. In theatres December 12.