Likable cast wasted in forgettable film
James L. Brooks, the writer and director best known for his multiple-Oscar winning and nominated pictures Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good as it Gets, returns to cinemas with his first film since 2010’s poorly reviewed How Do You Know? Unfortunately for Brooks, Ella McCay is bound to share the same fate as that forgettable flop rather than achieve the accolades of Brooks’s earlier titles.
Starring Sex Education’s Emma Mackey in the title role, Ella McCay recounts the trials and tribulations of an exceedingly young and extremely idealistic lieutenant governor of an unnamed state. Ella is suddenly thrust into the governorship in the halcyon days of fall 2008, when Barack Obama’s first election was inspiring progressives across the land. Ella’s boss, the folksy governor known as Governor Bill (Broadcast News’s Albert Brooks, looking older and wiser and perspiring significantly less) has resigned to join President Obama’s cabinet, leaving 34-year-old policy wonk wunderkind Ella to serve out Governor Bill’s remaining 14-month term.
That would all be fine and well, but Ella’s emotional and familial baggage threatens to weigh her down before she can even implement her do-gooder policies, like Tooth Tutors, which promises to send dental hygiene items to rural communities along with reading tutors. Plus, as she tells anyone who will listen, it’s fun to say! Such is the idealistic, glossy sheen Brooks casts over the picture. In that vein, Ella’s problems are treated similarly lightly, as she contends not just with work pressures, but with Ryan, her selfish, narcissistic pizza parlor-owning husband (Slow Horses hero Jack Lowden), Eddie, her absentee cad of a father (Woody Harrelson), and her younger brother Casey (Spike Fearn), a virtual shut-in with anxiety and agoraphobia issues. Ella also still grieves for her seemingly saintly mother Claire (Rebecca Hall, The Night House). Claire died when Ella was 16, and, in flashbacks, we see Claire stoically bearing her husband’s sexual impropriety accusations.
A side story about Casey and his attempts to reconnect with a quirky ex-girlfriend (Ayo Edebiri, After the Hunt) feels like the plot of a separate movie. Other odd choices include having Mackey, who is 29, also play the 16-year-old version of Ella, especially in scenes with Hall, who is 43. The pairing is distracting when Mackey looks too old for her part and Hall looks too young for hers.
And although the picture features some excellent and likable actors, they are mostly wasted in small, one-note roles. Jamie Lee Curtis as Ella’s protective Aunt Helen, Julie Kavner as Ella’s doting assistant and the film’s narrator, and Kumail Nanjiani in a thankless role as one of Ella’s security detail each bring moments of wry levity, but these aren’t enough to save an otherwise tonally weird, meandering film. Brooks takes too long to unspool his story, and for the first 45 minutes or so, all I was thinking was “where is this going?”
Where Brooks seems to be heading, as we patiently but indifferently watch the characters work through their problems, is to offer us a Capra-esque, feel-good statement about “humans helping humans.” That the film unabashedly echoes Obama’s famous “HOPE” campaign, right down to having a character tell us that “there’s no opposite word for trauma, but hope comes close” underscores the picture’s earnestness. You can’t argue with the message, but you can wish it were delivered a little more imaginatively.
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Ella McCay is now playing in theaters, including at the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville, the Regal Jack London in Oakland, and the Landmark Opera Plaza and the AMC Metreon in San Francisco.
