“Ella McCay” Is a Painful Mess

Ella McCay (James L. Brooks, 2025) 1 out of 5 stars

Born in 1940, James L. Brooks has been around for a while, making a deserved name with hit 1970s shows such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoff, Rhoda, and then with movies like the 1983 Terms of Endearment (for which he won the Oscar for Best Director), the 1987 Broadcast News, and the 1997 As Good As It Gets. His is an impressive career. This makes the colossal narrative misfire that is his latest, Ella McCay, all the more disappointing.

Starring Emma Mackey (Emily)—game, but the wrong actor for the part—in the title role, the movie follows its protagonist as she goes from being the youngest-ever lieutenant governor of her state to the youngest-ever governor, with plenty of misadventures along the way. As she journeys not-so-merrily along, we are constantly told (by her) how much she loves her job, yet never see her actually do it, so wrapped up in family dysfunction is the narrative. As a politician she is, like the plot, a pretty dismal failure.

Unable to decide what kind of film he wants to make, Brooks careens from scene to scene with a mix of comedy (or what is meant to be comedy), drama (mostly of the sappy variety), and something unpleasantly indecipherable, expositional dialogue informing us of this or that intended meaning. Talented actors flail in thankless parts, music swells in all the wrong places, and a generally bad time is had by all. No thank you.

Beyond Mackey, the cast includes Woody Harrelson (Fly Me to the Moon) and Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween Ends) as Ella’s eternally philandering father and her ever-loyal aunt; Spike Fearn (Alien: Romulus) as her depressed brother; Jack Lowden (Kindred) as her feckless husband; Kumail Nanjiani (Eternals)—completely wasted—as her assigned police-officer driver; and Julie Kavner (aka, the voice of Marge Simpson) as her administrative assistant and, for some reason, the movie’s narrator. Shining like a beacon amid the cinematic darkness is the great Albert Brooks as the soon-to-be-ex-governor. The movie desperately needs more of him.

Jumping hither and thither without much purpose, Ella McCay is a movie about what it takes to change the world that ignores the very hard work it takes to make said change. Its main character is deeply involved in politics yet has no understanding of it. She’s presented as a starry-eyed idealist and only accomplishes anything by happenstance. Perhaps in the time of Frank Capra such naïveté possessed charm (and it did), but Capra also had timing. As evidenced here, poor James L. Brooks has no such luck, and has mostly just lost his way.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.