Photo: Claire Folger/20th Century Studios/Everett Collection
I can’t help but make Ella McCay sound incredible to everyone I talk to about it, even though that’s not my intention, and even though Ella McCay is incredible only in the “Can you believe that actually happened?” sense. Some things you just have to see with your own eyes, and the first new film in 15 years from writer-director James L. Brooks is one of them. Despite being the work of someone who co-created one of the most successful TV series of all time in The Simpsons and who won Best Picture for the classic weepy Terms of Endearment, Ella McCay feels like outsider art — like it was made without any familiarity with the conventions of narrative structure or character beats. It aims for a tone of screwball comedy but misses not just that target but the whole damn dartboard, landing in a place that makes you wonder if the characters have checked their carbon-monoxide detectors lately, because nothing they do resembles the behavior of human beings breathing in the recommended levels of oxygen to function normally. Ella McCay is gas-leak cinema at its finest, which is to say that there is a naïve purity to its unhinged qualities that is almost charming.
For instance, while most of the movie is about the title character, a 34-year-old lieutenant governor played by Emma Mackey, there is an overlong subplot about Ella’s younger brother, Casey (Spike Fearn), that encapsulates the tonal dysfunction of the movie. Casey is an MIT-educated genius who hasn’t left his house in the 13 months since the demise of his relationship with Susan, the woman he was dating. It turns out that Susan didn’t end things with him so much as she failed to immediately agree to his request that they go exclusive, at which point he changed his number to prevent rejection. When Ella points out that this means that Casey effectively ghosted Susan, Casey decides to try to fix things by paying his ex a visit, opting to walk there across town to prove he isn’t agoraphobic. Susan (played in a single scene by an astonished-looking Ayo Edebiri) doesn’t just welcome this sweaty, manic man she hasn’t seen for over a year into her apartment when he finally arrives, but attempts to navigate a conversation he starts up as though no time has passed. And, just as I was turning to a friend to ask if this was ramping up to a murder-suicide scenario, Casey asks Susan for a second time if she wants to be his girlfriend, and she says (spoilers?) … yes!
There are many aspects of Ella McCay that are meant to read as lighthearted and wacky and instead feel alien, though few reach those same entrancing levels of off. There is, for instance, the fact that the film performs awkward verbal contortions to inexplicably keep the state in which it takes place, which is clearly in New England (it was shot in Rhode Island), unnamed. Or the scene in which, once Ella ascends to the governorship after her boss is appointed secretary of the Interior, her handsome wastrel of a husband, Ryan (Jack Lowden), demands to be declared unofficial co-governor, a heel turn so cartoonish the film inadvertently hints that he’s been planning it since they started dating in high school. Then there’s the way that Ella’s supposedly loving, no-nonsense aunt, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), ambushes her niece with a surprise reunion with the philandering father she hasn’t seen in years, and the reveal that that father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson), is only attempting to patch things up with his kids because the woman he’s been dating, who’s only ever glimpsed in passing, is threatening to leave him otherwise.
And that’s without ever getting to Kumail Nanjiani as the beatific state trooper who serves as Ella’s security detail and backup love interest, or Becky Ann Baker as Ella’s Machiavellian pizza chain-owning mother-in-law, or Julie Kavner as Ella’s adoring secretary, who also talks to the camera in narration that feels like it was added later in an attempt to keep all these threads straight. Ella McCay’s biggest issue is that it tries to cram a TV season’s worth of plot into a feature film, and storylines that might have made sense if given space to play out have instead been abbreviated into absurd stumps in which characters make screenplay-mandated choices that suggest brain trauma rather than any sense of interiority. Brooks is responsible for culture-defining work, and even if it’s nowhere close in terms of quality, Ella McCay does at different times bring to mind his pioneering workplace sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show and sublime network romantic comedy Broadcast News — especially when Albert Brooks glides through as Ella’s ascending boss and stands out as the only cast member who appears to have a firm grasp on what the filmmaker is going for. It’s simply missing a baseline coherence, as though something fundamental about how to tell a story has been forgotten.
James L. Brooks, who’s 85, has only made three movies this millennium, and his previous one, the professional-softball-player/corporate-malfeasance romance How Do You Know, was arguably even more confounding. At least the idea animating Ella McCay is clear, even if the execution is hopelessly muddled. Ella McCay is about a woman whose try-hard devotion to the actual work of being a politician also makes her unelectable because other people find her so grating. She is Lisa Simpson, down to the fact that in her first gathering of the state legislature, she accidentally keeps everyone locked in with her for hours without a break out of sheer enthusiasm. But it’s also obvious that for Brooks, who’s opted to make his film a 2008 period piece in order to ward off any need to acknowledge Trump, Ella McCay also functions as spiritual Hillary Clinton fan fiction, down to the departing governor — who’s ceding the stage to Ella and who has no issues working a crowd — being named Bill. Ella, who’s never more excited than when talking about implementing a policy to help alleviate poverty by getting toothpaste companies to sponsor oral-health education, is a representative of an alternate reality that never was. She’s a girl who never got to boss, a woman battling past the burdens of the disappointing men in her life to implement her neoliberal ideals. The wistfulness with which the movie treats her is the wooziest thing of all.
