Ella McCay

The Weight of Sincerity in a Cynical World

I'm not really sure what year *Ella McCay* thinks it was made in, but it's definitely not 2025. James L. Brooks, directing for the first time in 15 years, has delivered a film that feels like it was beamed in from another dimension where streaming wars never happened and mid-budget studio comedies still ruled theaters. He intentionally sets it in 2008, seemingly to avoid our current heated political climate. The result is a baffling, messy, but oddly heartfelt political dramedy that I wanted to love way more than I did.



Emma Mackey plays the Ella of the title, a 34-year-old lieutenant governor nerd who accidentally gets the top job when her mentor, Governor Bill (a wonderfully tired Albert Brooks), leaves to join the Obama cabinet. Mackey is a fascinating screen presence. If you only know her as the fiercely private Maeve in *Sex Education*, seeing her stuck in sensible trench coats and bureaucratic panic here takes some getting used to. She plays Ella with a rigid, almost physical stiffness—her shoulders always up by her ears, her walk hurried and defensive. She's not playing a politician; she's playing a crossing guard trying to manage traffic in a hurricane.



The hurricane, naturally, is her family. Brooks has always been obsessed with how our personal messes spill into our professional successes (think of the control-room tears in *Broadcast News*). Here, Ella is overwhelmed by a lazy, attention-seeking husband (Jack Lowden), a reclusive brother (Spike Fearn), and a cheating father (Woody Harrelson) who shows up uninvited looking for easy forgiveness. Then there’s Jamie Lee Curtis as her fiercely protective Aunt Helen. Curtis spends the whole film operating on a different wavelength than everyone else, with endless smirks, gestures, and loud scolding. It's a loud performance. Sometimes too loud. But in such a sleepy movie, you almost appreciate the noise.



There’s one scene, though, where this whole strange project briefly comes into focus. Frustrated and swamped, Ella accidentally takes her brother's cannabis edibles and launches into a frantic, breathless rant about liberal policy ideas. For three minutes, Mackey's posture drops. The dialogue zings with that specific, neurotic rhythm Brooks used to get from Holly Hunter and Shirley MacLaine. You can suddenly see the screwball comedy this was meant to be. But the high quickly wears off. As Caroline Siede noted in Paste Magazine, the film ultimately "resides in the emotional uncanny valley"—it features characters trying to celebrate the human spirit without ever really convincing us they are human themselves.

I left the theater feeling a bit like Ella herself: confused, exhausted, and acutely aware that you can't always fix what's broken. Whether that's a flaw or a feature probably depends on your patience for a director who still believes, perhaps naively, that just being decent is enough to carry a story. It isn't, really. But I'm kind of glad he still thinks it is.