'Ella McCay' is the Weirdest Movie I've Seen Since 'Madame Web'

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Ella McCay is the weirdest movie I’ve seen since Madame Web, only instead of being an accidental satire of corporate buffoonery, this attempted charmer from a comedy legend is so skin-crawlingly uncanny for basically its entire runtime that I felt like I was disassociating. After it was over I sought out human interaction as quickly as possible, just to confirm that other people could see me and that I was still alive, and not stuck in some kind of manic, overstyled purgatory. To watch it is to become a stranger in a strange land.

All I knew of Ella McCay going in, and all it seems that 20th Century Studios has put out, was the poster image, of a young woman in a fabulous trenchcoat reaching down towards her broken chunky heel, like the first act of a rom-com or Mentos commercial. “A new comedy from James L. Brooks,” the poster’s text promised, which for many of us, was enough.

Brooks, co-creator of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and The Simpsons, is a guy you imagine can do basically whatever he wants, creatively, with plenty of money and one of the securest legacies in show business. Every so often he wants to make a movie— Broadcast News (1987), As Good As It Gets (1997), Spanglish (2004)—and Ella McCay is his first in 15 years (since How Do You Know, in 2010). It seemed to be worth taking a flyer.

One of the things that makes Ella McCay such a bizarre experience is that it’s almost as hard to figure out what it was supposed to be as it is to determine what it is. The press notes claim an homage to screwball comedies of the 1950s, but at best it seems to land in some liminal zone between Booksmart and Mayberry. Best I can tell is that Brooks, who wrote and directed, was trying to make a movie about a grown-up Tracy Flick from Election, if, instead of an obnoxious, ruthless climber she was actually a relentlessly kind-hearted do-gooder who was the hero of every scene. It’s essentially Mrs. Flick Goes to Washington, staged as an inspirational drama. Put another way, Ella McKay is like if Lisa Simpson grew up to be the youngest governor of an unnamed state, and she was always right and every male character was some version of Homer, only handsomer. Except for one good cop, played by Kumail Nanjiani, who tells his partner, in the midst of complaining about an expensive divorce, “She deserves that money, man.”

Exactly the kind of thing you can imagine a cop saying to his griping partner!

With a star-studded cast that includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Albert Brooks, Woody Harrelson, and Ayo Edebiri, Ella McCay nonetheless has the kind of uncanny lighting, staging, styling, and writing that you normally don’t see outside of faith-based culture war fodder from Lionsgate or Hallmark Channel originals. It’s like a secular God’s Not Dead promoting overachievers and bipartisan consensus.

Emma Mackey plays the lead, looking like a dead ringer for Margot Robbie in a brown wig, and honestly my first clue that she wasn’t Robbie was the acting. It’s hard to tell whether Mackey was ever in the same room as any of her costars, so disconnected she seems from any normal human energy or interaction. Mackey has already been nominated for the British equivalent of an Emmy (BAFTA TV) and won the British equivalent of an Oscar (the BAFTA Rising Star Award, in 2023) so I have to think this uncanny quality was due more to the writing and staging than the acting, but to say Ella McCay does Mackey no favors would be an understatement. (“With Emma Mackey, a star is born!” the one sheet quotes Pete Hammond, whose appearance is always a great sign that a studio couldn’t find anyone else to say something nice about a movie).

It certainly doesn’t help that Brooks is deliberately vague on where Ella McCay takes place (a la The Simpsons, though in that case it was a running joke). He is, however, hyper-specific on when it takes place: late 2008, in the wake of the financial crisis. Julie Kavner (yes, Marge Simpson) explains all of this directly to the camera in the opening shot, as Estelle, both the film’s narrator and Ella’s secretary. Estelle explains that she met Ella McCay fresh out of law school and has been with her ever since. “So I’m not exactly neutral,” Kavner rasps. “I’m nuts about her.”

Why bother with the klutzy rom-com first act and the broken heels when you can just have a narrator say “You are supposed to like this character.” A true innovation!

Ella’s origin story, such as it is, goes back to high school, when she was the unhappy daughter of a cad father, played by Woody Harrelson. He’s a prominent doctor, about to be feted at a send-off party, though Ella, in bad bangs meant to differentiate her younger self from her current one (Mackey is 29 playing 34 while looking 23), demonstrates her do-gooder cred by loudly pointing out that it’s silly for them all to pretend that this is some honor, and not a forced transfer after Dad was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. Harrelson gets to spend all of the ensuing movie smirking apologetically for the lech we never actually see him being, while his wife, played by my personal crush Rebecca Hall, mercifully gets killed off early on and offscreen of unknown causes, as per Hallmark Movie dictats. Can’t have a sympathetic lead without a dead mom, I always say. Just ask Bambi and Nemo and Lilo and Molly Ringwald.

Adding insult to injury, this is all happening just as Ella is trying to tell her family about the A+ she got on her sociology paper. This superlative is Ella’s first inkling of her own self worth, a paper on which her teacher has helpfully written “YOU CAN BE A FORCE FOR GOOD!”

Ella took this to heart apparently, and when we flash forward to the present day, she’s working as the Lieutenant Governor for an unnamed state, under her more cynical but charming boss, Governor Bill, played by Albert Brooks. He’s working the phones begging for donations while Ella helpfully points out the names of his constituents’ spouses and children. “Why don’t you let me work the phones for a while,” she asks, “I love talking to voters.”

“I know you do,” Brooks says, “That’s why you’re bad at it. You’ll talk to one voter for 45 minutes! We’ve got 700 names to get through.”

Just to reiterate, Ella is a character who we’re supposed to like. She loves homework and telemarketers and people who watch videos on their phone at full blast without headphones. Every spam text is a just a fresh opportunity to tell someone to have a blessed day! Don’t you just adore her??

Ella is a very good person, the movie never tires of reminding us, who believes that all of her problems are very big—which she illustrates in every scene by closing her eyes while she recounts her problems to convey internal turmoil. This just before jutting out her exquisite chin out to convey determination and pluckily outlining her proposed solution. It’s delivered as a sort of old-fashioned love letter to gumption, but plays out like a precocious middle schooler having a stroke.

It’s also just plain hard to tell what age Ella is supposed to be (before the movie just says so outright), or what regional accent she’s trying to do. The movie never tells us where they are and the actress playing Ella clearly isn’t American. At one point she pronounces “gonna” as “goan-uh,” which isn’t a version of that I’ve ever heard. Another innovation.

Gov. Bill, the salty ol’ sumbitch, has some good news though: he’s joining the cabinet, of the unnamed new president (*cough* OBAMA! *cough, cough*). And so “the party” (the Democrats!) need Ella to take over the governor’s office. She has lots of big plans to improve the state (a force for good!), though Governor Bill wonders aloud whether she has the sliminess required to horse trade with other pols to get anything done, or to make enough disingenuous promises for the unwashed masses not to run her out of office.

That’s not really what’s on Ella’s mind though, which we know because her eyes are closed again. Turns out, she has a BIG SCANDAL brewing. The scandal? She used the apartment under the Capitol Dome (a thing that definitely exists?) to have lunchtime quickies with her husband whom she didn’t get to see enough thanks to her 17-hour work days (she works so hard!). Which is technically a misuse of government property for personal use. Her husband, played by Jack Lowden, is her former high school sweetheart and the heir to a pizza fortune, who has, against Ella’s wishes, promised a reporter “special access” in exchange for not revealing this secret. But Ella can’t give the reporter this special access (chin jutting), she won’t!

It’s hard to imagine what planet a person would have to be living on or what news cycle they’ve been exposed in order to buy this as a plausible American political scandal, not even back in those doe-eyed innocent days of (*checks notes*) 2008. Even in the movie it proves ultimately to be not that big a deal, though it’s also hard to imagine what this storyline is accomplishing narratively, beyond being the setup for a joke whereby reporters take to calling Ella “Governor Nooner.” I guess that’s sort of funny if you’re over 70 and have spent the last decade watching nothing but Hallmark Movies.

Jamie Lee Curtis plays Helen, Ella’s aunt, who took in Ella after Ella’s father had to move to a different state where no one knew how handsy he was. We’re treated to a full flashback of this happening, complete with Ella going down the list of all the extra-curriculars she’s much too busy with to consider switching schools midway through her senior year. Helen adopts Ella, though Helen has never trusted Ryan, Ella’s boyfriend/future husband, from the beginning. At first it’s unclear why, since Ryan seems like a fairytale ideal of a supportive girlboss dreamboy, independently wealthy and fully invested in Ella’s success. It turns out, though, Helen was right all along. Because grown-up Ryan (no longer with his laughable “teenager” wig, which looks like Happy Gilmore’s caddy) is eventually caught bribing a reporter with $7500 to kill another incredibly banal but allegedly bombshell story. Tiny bribes and non-stories, oh yes, please tell me more.

You might rightly be wondering how this level of drama could possibly fill an entire 115-minute movie. The answer is that there is also lots of seemingly irrelevant characters and baffling plotlines. Like Ella’s younger brother, Casey (Spike Fearn), a shaggy agoraphobic math genius who makes $2 million a year doing sports gambling for other people (why not himself? No idea). When Ella shows up at his gross hoarder hovel (which actually looks like a pretty normal apartment, despite Ella’s reaction to it), he begins their conversation, “So, Aunt Helen tells me you’re the governor now.”

Definitely a believable thing for someone to say to his sister who has just become the state’s youngest governor!

Casey is just one of the many annoying men making Ella’s life so hard, I suppose. And so there’s an entire B-story about how he broke up with his girlfriend because he was confused by how she responded to him asking her to be his girlfriend, and then he changed phone numbers, and now it’s 13 months later and he has to go show up at her house unannounced to ask if she wants to be his girlfriend again. The ensuing scene, between Fearn and the otherwise fantastic Ayo Adebiri from The Bear playing his ex, is one of the most disjointed and pointless exchanges ever put to film. The maybe sort of autistic brother explains why he changed phone numbers and split, and his maybe sort of autistic ex-girlfriend tries to explain how she feels about him even though she doesn’t want to be having this conversation, and they keep doubling back and contradicting themselves in a dialogue that plays out like two intensely grating ships passing in the night. I’ve already memory-holed most of the specifics, but it was genuinely distressing. It is mystifying the degree to which no one in this movie seems to connect with anyone else.