Ella McCay review: Unfocused drama with too many characters
Ella McCay, the first film written and directed by Terms of Endearment legend James L. Brooks in 15 years, has flown under the radar and is being released without much fanfare (for a 20th Century movie). Now that I’ve seen it, I can understand the reason for this.
This political drama stars Sex Education breakout Emma Mackey as the titular Ella McCay, an idealistic 34-year-old lieutenant governor of an undisclosed U.S. state in 2008. Ella has a lot going on in her life – her estranged father (Woody Harrelson) wants to reconcile, she is concerned about her agoraphobic younger brother Casey (Spike Fearn), and her husband Ryan (Jack Lowden) seems to be using her to further his own ambitions. If that wasn’t enough, her mentor and the state’s longtime incumbent governor, Bill (Albert Brooks), accepts a cabinet position in the federal government, and she becomes his successor. She is now the governor! It’s impossible to juggle it all, especially when you throw a scandal in the mix.
Movies like Ella McCay – a straightforward, earnest drama about one fictional woman’s life – really don’t get made anymore, especially not for the cinema. So I really wanted to love this film, but it was too average for there to be any risk of that. It has been heavily slated, but I found it engaging and solid, and the cast was great. I enjoyed many of its parts, even if they came together to make a whole that was uneven, unfocused and ultimately unsatisfying by the very end.
I think Brooks bit off more than he could chew, having so many characters and well-known actors in each of the parts. Naturally, some end up with very little to do, such as Kumail Nanjiani as Ella’s guard/driver Trooper Nash and Ayo Edebiri as Casey’s love interest. They are great actors and I didn’t dislike their scenes, but the film is overstuffed, so the ensemble needed to be streamlined to help with the pacing and keep the focus on Ella.
Ella is an interesting and complex character, but she is often reacting to other people’s decisions rather than driving the plot forward herself. Similarly, Mackey puts in a wonderful performance (she really deserves to be a bigger star), but is often outshone by her co-stars, who are bigger, louder and have more colourful characters. For example, Jamie Lee Curtis as Ella’s Aunt Helen steals every scene as the feisty, overprotective surrogate mum because she has an outspoken personality, funny facial expressions and does as much as she can to breathe life into the sometimes clunky, overwritten script. Fearn is also excellent as her awkward brother, so I’m not mad about his scenes, but they do feel like a distraction from the core stories.
For me, the most compelling and exciting aspect was Ella’s marriage to Ryan, and I would have liked more focus on that. It’s rare to see this dynamic, where the woman has the power, and the man is trying to manipulate her for his own advantage. He is awful and stoops to some shocking lows, and I couldn’t see why she was with him in the first place. Considering how wordy this film is, I couldn’t believe Brooks didn’t give us an explosive confrontation! I really cared about this storyline, and he didn’t follow it through in a satisfying way.
It’s a shame Ella McCay doesn’t work better because there is a lot to like in here, from Mackey, Curtis and Fearn to the shocking relationship storyline. But there’s too much going on and Brooks loses sight of the central story.
In cinemas from Friday 12th December