To say James L. Brooks is accomplished is a wild understatement. Starting in television, Brooks went from early work writing on My Mother the Car (when are we going to reboot that?) to creating The Mary Tyler Moore Show and co-creating Taxi. He directed the second feature film he wrote, 1983’s Terms of Endearment, which made $164 million on an $8 million budget alongside 9 Academy Award nominations. Brooks himself won three: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Brooks hasn’t directed a film since 2010’s ensemble romcom, How Do You Know. All of this is necessary context to explain why his latest directorial effort, Ella McCay, is one to watch. There’s a good cast here that carries more than they ought to, but it’s still a film that suffers under the weight of a series of odd choices in its narrative focus and tonal choices. The result of all these choices is a film that seems to want to be vaguely for everyone to such a degree that it’s never for anyone at all.
What Is ‘Ella McCay’ About?

Ella McCay stars Sex Education’s Emma Mackey as the titular character, a politically optimistic, earnest (but too rigid to be charming) 34-year-old Lieutenant Governor preparing to take over for an unnamed state’s longtime Governor Bill (Albert Brooks), who has been tagged to join the cabinet of the Obama administration. It’s a lot to take on, especially as McCay balances is against her often tumultuous family life. Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) is her loving rock, but Ella’s husband Ryan (Jack Lowden) likes the political limelight too much. When her estranged father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson), comes to make amends, when she already has a host of new political responsibilities, well, it’s all too much.
‘Ella McCay’ Can’t Decide What Sort of Film It Wants To Be

Helen reaches across a kitchen island to touch Ella’s hand as they sit together with tea.Image via 20th Century Studios

From the opening credits onward, Ella McCay seems to suffer from a lack of perspective and a subsequent inability to stick to a particular tone. Mere minutes into Ella McCay, we’re greeted by whimsical opening narration by Estelle (Julie Kavner), Ella’s secretary. Kavner is an excellent actress, sporting one of the most famous voices in cartoon history as Marge Simpson, and she brings life and a distinct personality to Estelle whenever she’s onscreen. In the film’s too-ample voiceover, however, it sounds like Marge is voicing the film. That never quite reads right, even for a film that seems to be going for “vague whimsy” as its driving tone. The search for this tone covers almost every detail of the film, including its time period: it’s during the Obama-era recession, but told from our present. We’re reminded of national pain we never see, and are shown good-natured political optimism that would be anachronistic now, reading like an effort to find a nostalgic era that still has cell phones. We’re never told exactly what state, exactly, Ella becomes governor of. It doesn’t seem huge, it isn’t in the South, and it isn’t in Vermont. Ella’s family has dealt with genuine personal issues. Her dad’s a lifelong philanderer. Her mother, played by a tragically underutilized Rebecca Hall, has long since passed away. Her relentlessly charming husband (think dirtbag golden retriever energy) both causes Ella political problems and then tries to profit from them. The film introduces Ella into this complex new political spotlight with big goals to make the state better, then we spend the bulk of the film ignoring those new realities in favor of the minutiae of inter-familial conflict: never consequential enough to be worth following for 115 minutes, but surely not funny enough to be a proper comedy. And since it’s never quite a comedy, people make choices and say things that don’t read like realistic choices and dialogue, and they never quite work.

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At the center of this mess sits a set of performances that are, beyond some writing oddities, pretty good. Emma Mackey’s Ella is stiff, sure, but she has a rare level of earnestness that makes her seriousness more lovable than it otherwise might be in a protagonist. She carries the film well enough that one wonders what she could have done with better material. Jamie Lee Curtis is warm but with an appropriate edge, and the two have great on-screen chemistry. Kumail Nanjiani has one of the film’s smaller roles as Ella’s protection detail/chauffeur, but he’s genuinely charming throughout. Woody Harrelson spends much of the film being pushed from Ella’s orbit, so he, too, isn’t on camera as much as he ought to be, but he’s great as a pathetic dad who is just charming enough to boil himself alive in trouble. There surely are factors that work for Ella McCay, but they can’t fit the vision for a film that doesn’t ever congeal into its own solid identity.
Ella McCay Loses Its Potential In The Inane Details

It’s actually a little difficult to say if there’s a better version of Ella McCay buried somewhere inside this movie, given that it’s hard to pin down what the intended target of this movie is at the end of the day. It’s transparently a film about a young woman thrust into a huge position, then doesn’t get to spend any time on that because of a barely notable family drama. Imagine a version of Milk that forgoes the struggle for gay rights, instead spending two hours on Harvey Milk planning actions to defeat Proposition 6, before he’s always interrupted by annoying family members visiting, not taking his calls, or asking too much of him. Ella McCay isn’t trying to be a serious biopic about a real-life civil rights pioneer, of course, but the point is to highlight that Milk wouldn’t be what it is if the character was constantly plagued by inane interruptions, the same phenomena that keep Ella McCay (a character who constantly talks about all the good she wants to do) from doing much of anything, at all. It’s a tale full of sound and no fury, still signifying nothing. Ella McCay is now playing in theaters.

Release Date

December 12, 2025

Director

James L. Brooks

Writers

James L. Brooks

Producers

Julie Ansell, Richard Sakai

Pros & Cons

Emma Mackey is a charming lead who gives a one note character more depth than is in the script.
There’s a great supporting cast, all of whom really congeal into a good group dynamic, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Kumail Nanjiani standing out.

The set up suggests the audience will actually see any of the complex, fish-out-of-water machinations Ella discusses, but the entire film gets lost in inane and mundane family drama.
There’s a real tonal issue with Ella McCay, which seems to aim for vague whimsy and doesn’t quite land in any coherent direction.