Ella McCay fascinates me. Many movies don’t work because they have broad, overarching issues that hold the film back, and trust me, this movie has a lot of those, but I’ve never seen a movie get so many minute, seemingly insignificant details so horribly wrong. Every movie has a minor goof here and there, but Ella McCay has so many, and I found myself fixating on all of these little issues more than any human being should. Every little flaw adds up to create one of the most baffling movies I’ve seen in a long time. This movie deserves to be shown in film schools all over the world…as a cautionary tale.
I have a bad feeling about this. These seven words, made famous by the Star Wars franchise, seeped into my brain as the movie begins with Estelle (Julie Kavner) looking at us, the audience, and introducing herself as the film’s narrator. Because that’s what every movie needs, right? A narrator to tell things directly to the audience. I believe the phrase is tell-don’t-show. It’s so confusing why we have Estelle narrating this. If we’re going to have a narrator in a movie called Ella McCay, shouldn’t the narrator be Ella McCay? Estelle is such a minor, undeveloped character in the movie that there’s no reason why we should be getting this narration from her perspective.
The narration, which comes and goes as the movie pleases, is completely useless. Like most bad uses of narration in film, it’s either telling us information we can clearly see on screen, or at worst, it’s giving information that you do not need in order to understand what’s going on. It doesn’t enhance anything; it just hurts. But pretty soon, we have our protagonist, Ella (Emma Mackey), telling her father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson), something along the lines of, “I don’t know how I feel about the circumstances of you getting fired surrounding your sexual relations with multiple women.” That bad feeling I had? Yeah, it just got worse.
Exposition. One of the key ingredients in any story to make anything work, but if you don’t do it right, you get movies like Ella McCay. This is a film where people say everything that’s on their minds. They spell out every single thought inside of their heads. A teenage Ella is trying to explain why she doesn’t want to leave school, and she instantly comes up with a perfectly scripted laundry list of reasons. Subtext has gone out the window. Characters state the situation and circumstances of everything that’s going on. Because that’s the phrase, right? Tell-don’t-show? Is this supposed to be a movie or a manuscript?
Who wrote and directed this abomination? James L. Brooks: an 85-year-old veteran of movies and TV. He directed Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good As It Gets. He’s helped create little-known TV shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and, oh, right, The Simpsons. Three-time Oscar winner. 22-time Emmy winner. How is this person making mistakes that college students majoring in film production can avoid?
There’s a scene where Ella is watching an anchor doing a live news broadcast on TV. We see some of it, and then we hear some of it. And then at some point, the anchor stops talking. The anchor fully pauses what she’s saying so that we can hear Ella turn to her husband in the room and talk. It would make sense if we could still hear the anchor ever-so-slightly in the background while Ella is talking, even if it’s much quieter, but no, there’s zero noise coming from the TV, and then a few seconds later, the anchor starts talking again while Ella is only half-paying attention to the TV. That’s terrible sound editing.
Ella McCay features an alien’s approximation of human emotions. If Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets angry at Eddie, she needs to raise her voice and yell at him, and she needs to say the words, “I’m really angry!” Good to know! I don’t know how I would have been able to tell that Helen was angry without her saying those three words. There’s an early flashback scene with Rebecca Hall as Ella’s mother in a role that’s so small and insignificant that they did not deserve an actress of Hall’s caliber for this. Anyone here seen The Night House? Watch that movie if you want to see Hall play a way more interesting character than this movie’s Unnamed Dead Wife.
Anyway, after Mrs. McCay kicks the bucket, Ella is so sad that she takes her brother upstairs with the full verbal intent of crying with him. It’s just so odd! Most people don’t want to cry; they want not to cry. Here, Ella seems to basically put crying into her to-do list, and in front of her brother, too! Brooks’s strange approach to emotions in this film unfortunately affects Emma Mackey’s lead performance. I’m sure Mackey is a talented actress who deserves more leading lady roles in movies. But in this film, it feels like she’s hitting each and every emotion like bullet points.
Ella is a lieutenant governor preparing to take a new job while balancing many parts of her life. In one of the film’s many ludicrous scenes, Ella is giving a speech, and someone slips a note for her to read during the speech. This trips her up so much that she fully stops what she’s saying mid-sentence, pauses for several seconds, and continues. Another note is slipped to her, and she does it again! How can she be a governor if she’s this bad at public speaking? In what world do you not finish your sentence first, glance at the note, and then keep talking? Why does she repeatedly stop for several seconds in the middle of her sentence just to read a note?
At some point, I had to try to examine what Brooks was thinking here. I realized that this movie wasn’t taking itself very seriously, so maybe I shouldn’t either. Ella McCay is going for this very quirky, whimsical tone. It’s a somewhat heightened reality filled with eccentric little details. I think it would have worked if this were a funny movie. It’s not funny. My theater was silent. I was silent. The movie sure thinks it’s funny. But it’s not. It’s really not. I was holding on for dear life, trying to make sense of it all.
These characters aren’t even fun to be around. Ella can be overbearing from time to time. Her husband Ryan (Jack Lowden) is written to be unbearable. He’s a terrible husband, and every action he performs digs Ella deeper into the ground. Ella’s neurotic younger brother Casey (Spike Fearn) weighs the movie down as well. His whole storyline should have been taken out. When he’s sharing the screen with Ella, I could justify why it was in there. When Casey goes off and rediscovers his ex-girlfriend Susan (Ayo Edebiri) and they share this ludicrous scene of reconnecting, I just wanted him off the screen. None of this added anything to the movie! This is supposed to be a film about Ella McCay. None of this Casey and Susan stuff was necessary!
Kumail Nanjiani plays Trooper Nash, and there’s this whole bit where another trooper he’s with decides to stay on the shift for a while longer so that they can make overtime pay. The movie spends so long on this. Why? I don’t know! None of this was important in the long run! There’s a scene where Trooper Nash turns on the radio station, and he turns it to “The News.” No made-up radio station name. Not even a time-specific broadcast name like “Evening News at 6”. First name: The. Last name: News. Are you kidding me?
There’s another scene where it’s pouring rain, and Trooper Nash is dropping off Ella somewhere. Why are they doing all of this in the rain without an umbrella? As a matter of fact, Trooper Nash is quite literally holding an umbrella in his hand in the scene! But he has it closed! It’s pouring rain, you have an umbrella in your hand, and you decide not to open it and give yourself some cover?! The narration, which has continued all throughout the film, even includes phrases like, “they had self-doubts about themselves.” Did anyone proofread that?! You just said the same thing twice in one sentence!
Ella McCay might be the worst written movie of the year. Every emotion is delivered without subtlety. The dialogue is overwritten to the point of oblivion. This is first-draft dialogue. This is a vomit draft that accidentally got made into a movie. What’s worse is that this is a political film without anything interesting to say. There are no unique political themes or issues. I didn’t know or care what Ella’s policies were. I didn’t even care for her journey and how she changed over the course of the movie. This is a lesson in everything not to do in a film.
SCORE: 3/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 3 equates to “Bad.” Due to significant issues, this media feels like a chore to take in.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our Ella McCay review.