PLOT: Ella McCay (Emma Mackey), a thirty-four-year-old lieutenant governor, faces the daunting prospect of becoming governor when her mentor, Governor Bill (Albert Brooks), accepts a cabinet position. Before she even gets sworn in, she must deal with a potentially career-impacting scandal, while managing her insecure husband (Jack Lowden) and estranged father (Woody Harrelson), with only her aunt (Jamie Lee Curtis) keeping her sane.
REVIEW: Ella McCay is the review I was dreading to write. Whenever a director you admire makes a movie this bad, it’s always a bummer, and like many, I’ve always had a fondness for the work of James L. Brooks. As a writer-director, his Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good As It Gets are top-notch (and let’s not forget he’s also the man who got The Simpsons made). But his work over the last twenty years has been rough. Spanglish had a great Adam Sandler performance but didn’t work. How Do You Know (which remains Jack Nicholson’s last movie) was a disaster, but Ella McCay might be the worst of them.
If Ella McCay had been made twenty years ago, it would have seemed like an antique, but the whiskers are really showing in 2025, even if they try to date the film somewhat by setting it in 2008, making its political milieu less fraught (the movie’s one sharp line is when Julie Kavner’s narrator remembers it as “the time before we all hated each other”). Emma Mackey definitely seems like a star on the rise (she’ll be in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia movie), but she’s saddled with an impossible role—McCay is the kind of incredibly sunny optimist who’s so naïve it makes the notion of her political ascendancy impossible to swallow. This is a movie where McKay gasps in surprise when she realizes her brother smokes marijuana, and when she gets high for the first time, it’s unlike any weed experience even loosely tied to reality—about as cartoonish as when the centurions get high in Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I.
The whole film feels false from the get-go, with McCay an impossibly sweet, kind heroine without any character flaws whatsoever. She’s like the protagonist of a Doris Day movie circa 1960. Mackey is charming, but she’s playing a cartoon. The same could be said for Jamie Lee Curtis as her supportive aunt/surrogate mother, who’s portrayed as a somewhat sweeter version of Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment.
The male characters are even worse. Woody Harrelson plays McCay’s dad, whom the movie expects us to view as a “hilarious” deadbeat, but he comes off as almost psychotic—we watch him flirt with women at his dead wife’s funeral in flashbacks, not in a mean way, mind you, more in a “wow, what a character” kind of way. No actor alive could make this palatable, and Harrelson looks embarrassed.
Jack Lowden, as McCay’s longtime husband Ryan, somehow comes off even worse—maybe the least palatable screen husband since Eric Roberts in Star 80. He’s portrayed as so insecure about his wife’s elevation to governor that he launches into a campaign of seedy scheming, making it hard to swallow that McCay—who everyone keeps reminding us is so smart—wouldn’t have seen through him in eighteen years together. Again, he’s supposed to be “charming,” but Lowden plays him utterly without any of that quality. Brooks also stages much of the film in flashback, meaning we get a lot of scenes of the thirty-five-year-old Lowden and twenty-nine-year-old Mackey playing sixteen-year-olds.
As if the movie didn’t have enough subplots, there’s also loads of time devoted to Spike Fearn as Casey, McCay’s ne’er-do-well younger brother, who’s trying to win back his ex, played by Ayo Edebiri. Their reunion scene—delivered with dialogue that would be sinister in any other movie—is staged as sugary sweet here.
However, two cast members somehow walk out unscathed. One is Kumail Nanjiani as the nice-guy trooper on McCay’s detail; in a better version of this movie, he would have been the leading man. The other is Albert Brooks, who plays McCay’s boss, the acid-tongued but sympathetic Governor Bill, in a role that had to have been earmarked for Nicholson. He acquits himself nicely in a Nicholson-esque part, and his scenes are the only ones with the kind of bite that remind you how good James L. Brooks used to be at this kind of material.
Ella McCay is the director’s first movie in fifteen years, but rather than a solid return to form, it’s a movie people should have advised him against making. It will be ravaged by critics. It’s the kind of movie you feel embarrassed watching.
