Part of me really wanted “Ella McCay” to work. Not in a polite, professional way, but in a personal one. James L. Brooks’ films were stitched into my early movie memory: the swell of the “Terms of Endearment” score being the soundtrack of my earliest memories I have of my father, the awkward electricity of “As Good As It Gets” playing on VHS while I hovered at the edge of the room as the adults watched it at home, the moment I discovered “Broadcast News” and realized movies could be sharp and funny and aching at the same time.
So I went into “Ella McCay” with real goodwill. I wanted to feel the old rhythm again. I wanted to recognize the voice. Frankly, I wanted to root for the film. And then it started, and it kept starting, and restarting, and zigzagging, until whatever goodwill I had quietly packed up and left.
‘Ella McCay’: A Mishmash of Several Microfilms Clumped Together
This isn’t the mild disappointment of a late-career stumble. This is the baffling kind, the sort that sends you replaying scenes afterward, trying to pinpoint where things went wrong. The honest answer is harder: it never really goes right at any point.
Watching “Ella McCay” feels like being handed several potentially interesting movies at once and being asked to pretend they form a coherent whole. There’s the political story: a young lieutenant governor (Emma Mackey) suddenly elevated to the top job. There’s the family story: a wounded daughter, a cheating father (Woody Harrelson), a dead mother (Rebecca Hall), a fragile younger brother, a marriage already cracking. And then there’s the scandal, the workplace drama, the personal reinvention arc.
On paper, this should be Brooks territory. Interlocking lives. Emotional mess. Talky scenes that slowly reveal character. Instead, everything feels undercooked and overcrowded, as though the film is afraid to commit to any one thread, so it keeps tugging at all of them and finishing none.
Scenes don’t build on each other. They interrupt. Emotional beats are introduced, then quietly abandoned. Storylines arrive with urgency and leave without consequence. By the time the film ends, you’re less moved than puzzled. Not because it’s complex, but because it’s scattered.
A Political Film That Shirks from Responsibilities
The 2008 setting only deepens the confusion. When the film opened by situating itself in that year, I genuinely laughed, and not because it was clever. Unnamed state? Unspecified political party? Politics reduced to vague vibes. A world where scandals are quaint, institutions mostly function, and everything wraps up with improbable neatness.
If Brooks was aiming for a kind of fairy tale, this leans closer to fantasy than fable. Even without specifics, audiences already understand the fabric of political life well enough to fill in the blanks. Those blanks don’t become universal here. They become unintentionally comic. At times, “Ella McCay” is funny, yes. Just not in the way a comedy-drama hopes to be.
What makes this harder to accept is that you can see the outline of a better film underneath the mess. There is charm and sincerity here, and there are moments that almost land.
Most of the performances deserve more than the film gives them. Emma Mackey works hard to give Ella a pulse even when the writing undercuts her at every turn. Meanwhile, Jamie Lee Curtis brings warmth and bite to scenes that would otherwise feel weightless. You sense that the cast showed up out of respect, maybe even affection, for Brooks.
The problem is that the script leaves them stranded. Effort isn’t the issue; construction is.
Even the Music Can Only Do So Much
One of the few elements that genuinely works for me is the score. Hans Zimmer’s music brings a sense of life and emotional continuity that the film itself often lacks. It’s restrained, graceful, sometimes lightly playful, with orchestration that occasionally recalls the warmth of classic John Williams, and even Zimmer’s own underrated works in films such as “It’s Complicated” and “Something’s Gotta Give.”
And yet even here, there’s a bittersweet comparison. Set aside emotional tracks such as “Casey Opens Up” and “If You Even Liked Me,” and this film’s score pales compared to an earlier work: Zimmer previously collaborated with Brooks on “As Good As It Gets,” and that score carried real emotional heft.
Zimmer’s work here, conversely, does its best to hold the movie together, but it can’t compensate for the storytelling around it. It instead ends up feeling like mood lighting in a room where the furniture keeps collapsing.
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The Strange Sadness of This Experience
Halfway through, I caught myself wondering why this was bothering me so much. I don’t root for films to fail. I don’t enjoy piling on. But there’s a specific sadness in watching a filmmaker you once admired deliver work that feels detached from the qualities that made their films matter in the first place.
The Brooks who wrote characters that felt messy, contradictory, and recognizably human seems distant here. What we get instead are people who behave however the scene requires, then reset for the next one. By the end, my reaction settled into something simple and uncomfortable: I didn’t expect much, but I also didn’t expect it to be this dispiriting. Not offensive, not infuriating. Just draining. The kind of film that slowly erodes your initial goodwill instead of rewarding it. If I’m being honest, I’d rather spend time with Leslie Knope. At least her optimism comes with clarity, intention, and a sense of the world she’s actually living in.
I wanted to like “Ella McCay.” I really did. Somewhere along the way, though, that desire didn’t survive the movie.
“Ella McCay” premiered at the El Capitan Theatre on December 9, 2025, and was released in the United States by 20th Century Studios on December 12, 2025. Follow us for more coverage.
