Ella McCay Review: A ’90s Dramedy Throwback Without the Drama or Comedy

Why do they not make movies like the old days? It’s a refrain we hear time and again, be it among critic groups, awards voters, or vocal Letterboxd users looking for a fight. The broad sentiment can go back to the silent stars of yesteryear, reminiscing about an era before the pictures got small, but these days it’s more generally associated with the type of winsome, adult-skewing, and proudly middlebrow dramas that were a dime an Oscar-winning dozen during the ‘80s, ‘90s, and somewhere into the mid-2000s—all while IP tentpoles encroached ever further across the movie release calendar.

Kids who grew up in those decades remember it fondly, and those who were adults at the time hold on to it even tighter since they were the ones making ‘em. James L. Brooks is one such moviemaker, and he has the Oscars to prove it, courtesy of classics like Broadcast News and As Good as It Gets. Alas, it’s easier to forget he was also there for the dramedy’s decline when would-be, feel-good, weepy-laughers like Spanglish and How Do You Know withered on the vine until only a maudlin husk was left.

It gives me no pleasure to report, then, that Brooks’ intended triumphant return to the director’s chair at the age of 85 via Ella McCay recalls more of the filmmaker’s latter saccharine era than his early successes. Right down to its title, Ella McCay is meant to be something of an anachronism, remembering a time when audiences would turn up to pictures named after characters like Erin Brockovich or Jerry Maguire (the latter also produced by Brooks). Granted, both of those were vehicles for movie stars, but if Ella McCay does one thing right, it’s to convince the viewer that Emma Mackey deserves a chance to become one. Unfortunately, this movie is not it.

Among Ella’s strongest assets is a game ensemble, led by a French-English actress gifted enough to convince any viewer that she is an all-American working gal trying to make her way in a skeptical man’s world that’s still as condescending and unserious as when Mary Tyler Moore had to conquer the same paper tigers in another Brooks Boomer touchstone of the TV variety.

Ella McCay seems determined to be a kind of heir (or perhaps bookend?) to that seminal series where another generation of women must push, scrabble, laugh, and proverbially scream their way to the top. And in moments where Mackey literalizes this by hollering her frustrations at the urging of her tough-as-nails Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis with equal parts twinkle, steel, and syrup), McCay finds the right equilibrium between charm and schmaltz.

That alchemy fizzles, though, whenever Ella leaves auntie’s home, and even worse when the movie abandons its eponymous character for its litany of supporting players and surplus of subplots, none of which are as funny as Brooks’ creaky screenplay believes.

Julie Kavner, another Brooks veteran, attempts to hold it together with the kind of godmotherly voiceover narration that might have followed around Meg Ryan or Macaulay Culkin once upon a time, and she introduces us to Ella (Mackey) on the precipice of triumph and sorrow. When we meet her, she is the lieutenant governor of an unnamed state in 2009 (back when “we all still liked each other,” according to a narrator who doesn’t seem to remember birthers). Ella apparently earned her post due to her tireless work ethic and by being the wonk behind a smooth talking empty suit with that retail, human touch, Governor Bill (Albert Brooks, appropriately avuncular even when showing his hidden shark fin).

It seems Governor Bill is about to be appointed to the Obama administration’s cabinet, which means wunderkind Ella is going to achieve something she is told she could never do on her own: power. It should be her crowning moment, alas she has 99 problems that explain why she cannot enjoy it, and the men in her life are all of them—especially husband Ryan (Jack Lowden). Friendly, outgoing, and hopelessly needy, the incoming first husband is apparently dim enough to not know the nepotism of appointing a spouse or family member to a government position is illegal (at least back then). Worse, we are informed a journalist is sniffing around the fact that the new governor and her husband used to take long lunches in a state capital apartment, which is just tawdry enough to derail an ambitious agenda.

That alone should probably be enough to fill the dramatic and humorous heft of a busy new governor’s plate. But Brooks’ script also makes the inexplicable choice to jump back and forth between the past of Ella’s teenage years with her unfaithful, deadbeat Dad (Woody Harrelson) and the even odder choice to shoehorn in a tangent about Ella’s little brother Casey (Spike Fearn) in the present. In a bizarre approximation of comic relief, or for that matter the human condition, Casey spends his days dominating sports betting websites and suffering from an agoraphobia so severe that he presumably has never left the house in his whole life. Otherwise there would be no way to account for the character acting like a sheltered eight-year-old while interacting with his sister, the cops outside, or his ex (Ayo Edebiri, so wasted that one wonders if she has gambling debts of her own to explain the appearance).

Ella McCay not only struggles to balance these narrative threads but seems eerily convinced of their mirth since the film pauses time and again for a round of audience laughter that never comes. Nearly every big beat—be it Curtis or Kavner gesticulating a punchline with the waving hand motions for a phantom laugh track, or a running gag about Ella’s nerdy passion and fortitude putting all the other lazy politicians to sleep—feel like bits that came from a different medium and decade. Indeed, Kavner worked with Brooks on the sitcom classic Ronda, but given how inauthentic most of the characters read on screen, this stuff might better play on Mork and Mindy. I’d certainly buy a few of them are from different planets.

Obviously the movie is attempting to reach for a screwball energy that Brooks used to weave in and out of his darker, more grounded workplace insights. But that only works if the movie is actually funny. As it is, everything simply comes across as screwy.

There is some notion about offering a paean to the bridge-builders, and those who know how to get things done in a world that still functioned by the rules of the road, but it seems mostly stitched together by Kavner’s treacly voiceover narration, and admittedly the handful of performances that work even when they’re handed groaners: Curtis, Albert Brooks, Mackey, and Kumail Nanjiani in a role so superfluous it doesn’t even register in the synopsis.

Sometimes it’s a shame they don’t make ‘em like they used to. But sometimes it’s a blessing.

Ella McCay is in theaters on Dec. 12.