½*/****
starring Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kumail Nanjiani, Woody Harrelson
written and directed by James L. Brooks
by Walter Chaw I wonder if there’s an easy answer to the question of what the fuck happened to James L. Brooks. The James L. Brooks who created “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Taxi”. Who never made a movie in which I couldn’t at least see bits of the Brooks I have always loved, up to and including the one that started out as a musical. Even motherscratching Spanglish–which is terrible, sure, but has its virtues in retrospect–or How Do You Know, which, although I’ve largely blocked it out, didn’t rub me wrong like his latest does. What happened to the man behind Broadcast News, my favourite film of the 1980s while I’m watching it (a thing I try to do at least once a year)? That James L. Brooks. Ella McCay, Brooks’s first movie in well over a decade, is dreadful. It’s his Megalopolis: an elderly attempt at reckoning with the fall of the American Empire that is neither sharp enough to fully recognize the gravity of the current moment nor stout enough to deal with it meaningfully even if it were. It’s like trying to cut a garden hose with a soup spoon. Maybe whatever pixie dust Polly Platt sprinkled on her collaborators to make them almost as brilliant as she was finally wore off. Maybe it’s just time, the great equalizer. We’re bound to lose with age not only physical vigour, but also the edge of wit and the ability to ken when you’ve lost the thread–and the room along with it.
Ella (Emma Mackey) is the ideological offspring of Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt: the youngest lieutenant governor ever, who has a disastrous term trying to be a do-gooder in the besmirched name of civil service. Mackey is a weird chimera of Emma Stone and Margot Robbie, tasked with being Holly Hunter’s character from Broadcast News minus the self-effacement, disarming charm, and, crucially, the balancing forces of William Hurt and Albert Brooks in their respective primes. No wonder a much older Albert Brooks, who plays Ella’s avuncular predecessor, is pretty much the only interesting thing about the film–though by “interesting,” I mean capable of transcending James L. Brooks’s self-devouring, circular dialogue and propensity to end each scene with a transitional sentence referring back to the picture’s groundbreaking thesis that special interests and venal politicians broke politics. Indeed, the only checks to Ella’s aggressive, antic solipsism are Jamie Lee Curtis as her eccentric, similarly manic Aunt Helen and Spike Fearn, playing Patrick Fugit’s affectations as Ella’s neurodivergent little brother, Casey. A parade of quirk. A gallery of irrepressible bon vivants, non? If nothing else, Ella McCay pushes all of my buttons. The only movie I found more irritating this year is Hamnet.
Consider a scene late in the film where Ella presides over a Very Important cabinet meeting, Lisa Simpson-ing her many ideas about social equality and a government by and for the people. She lifts her head to take a breath and realizes she’s kept everyone hours past quitting time, unaware she’s been monologuing passionately without interruption. This follows an acceptance speech that has seen her do essentially the same thing, to the horror of her few supporters, in an office where almost no one actually likes her, according to her mentor. Alas, her righteousness is tedious, and her approach is off-putting. Rejection is the only proper way to solve a problem like Ella. Everyone who’s supposed to be wrong here has a good point. What happens when the adorable centre of your film is nails on a chalkboard? Ella McCay is what happens.
Julie Kavner is Ella’s crusty secretary and narrates the film, jumping the timeline between the year Ella’s mother (Rebecca Hall) died and the “present,” eighteen years later, when Ella gets a chance to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington this unnamed backwater to her image in the few days before The Swamp swallows her alive and she becomes a non-profit school-lunch person or something. Asking Mackey to play 34 and 16 is akin to asking Ms. Flo to do more or less the same in Gerwig’s Little Women, incidentally. We should probably retire this practice for a while. Elsewhere, there’s a lot of therapeutic screaming of the type meant to be cathartic for the audience in movies of gentle uplift: the cast screams in frustration; we laugh in relief. Brooks handled this sort of thing well with Jane’s scheduled cry sessions in Broadcast News, but in Ella McCay, it’s merely a different kind of affected noise. Speaking of, there’s also a lot of dialogue that people cannot deliver like human beings. And so, just as certain lifeforms appear seemingly spontaneously in nature when conditions are perfect for their survival, so materializes Ayo Edebiri as Casey’s ex, in an unforgivable and pointless five-minute cameo featuring more carefully affected stammers than a Hugh Grant retrospective.
Ella McCay is bottom-heavy with subplots (chief among them her bad dad (Woody Harrelson) and his attempts to make good, and a Chad Lowe-esque husband who’s butt-sore and vengeful because Ella forgets to thank him in her acceptance speech) and top-heavy with self-importance. In its efforts to be a Movie of Our Time, it highlights how out of touch its legendary creator has become. Sure, he diagnosed the erosion of the line between news and entertainment 40 years ago, but what has he pulled the lid off now? Congressional gridlock? Corrupt politicians? Perhaps untreated neurodivergence manifesting as a neo-Frank Capra movie that leans heavily on Capra’s celebrated sentimentality while ignoring the filmmaker’s formidable edge. Did I mention that scene where Ella accidentally doses herself with edibles and launches into another of her idioglossic rants to the agony of Casey? (He is, in that moment and never again, a precise audience surrogate.) All those lines ported directly from Broadcast News in the way that older people sometimes repeat the same stories to the same audiences? If Ella McCay tried to do less, I might have liked it more. If it had not wagged a gnarled finger at us for not doing better with our elections and expecting more of our politicians, because, look, Grandpa, if we’re going to start talking about generations silencing previous generations with their myopia and deathlock on power… Anyway, Ella McCay is terrible agitprop, terrible championing of policy wonkery, terrible political satire. It falls out of a boat and misses the ocean. There’s your public service.
