TL;DR: The hardest part of watching Ella McCay is realizing that Brooks hasn’t lost his curiosity—just his precision. His characters still talk like they’re halfway through a life-changing epiphany. His scenes still linger. His emotional instincts still want to crack something open. But the film never crystallizes into the incisive, humanistic dramedy it clearly aims to be.
Ella McCay
I grew up treating James L. Brooks movies like comfort food for the anxious millennial soul. Whenever life felt like an overcaffeinated improv exercise, I’d shuffle back to Broadcast News or As Good As It Gets, throw on a hoodie, and let those perfectly calibrated emotional detonations remind me that messy humans could still be lovable, hilarious, and devastating all at once. Brooks’ screenwriting has always felt like it ran on this weird, elegant physics engine where characters ricocheted into revelations—awkward, painful, intimate, true. So seeing his name attached to Ella McCay, his first feature in fifteen years, was the kind of news that made me put down my phone and whisper the rare Hollywood prayer, please don’t suck.
Reader, it did not listen.
Ella McCay is a political dramedy that wants to be a spiritual successor to Brooks’ earlier masterpieces, a return-to-form crowd-pleaser crafted out of whip-smart dialogue, adult emotions, and unvarnished humanity. Instead, what we get feels like someone tried to reboot a James L. Brooks movie using only the Cliff Notes, a box of expired improv prompts, and a political optimism last seen alive in 2008. The film is chaotic, disjointed, and oddly hollow—like watching a prestige TV writers’ room try to reverse-engineer sincerity by committee.
What really stings is how clearly the ambitions are right there on the surface. Brooks is still chasing complexity. He’s still letting scenes run long, still pushing actors toward overlapping emotional registers, still obsessed with the connective tissue between people who love each other but fail each other constantly. All of the ingredients that once made him one of the all-time great Hollywood humanists are technically present. They just don’t assemble into anything resembling the cinematic meals he used to cook in his sleep.
Instead, Ella McCay operates like a malfunctioning jukebox of his greatest hits—nostalgic, recognizable, but flatly off-key.
Emma Mackey plays Ella, a 34-year-old lieutenant governor who suddenly finds herself promoted when her charismatic boss is whisked away to join Obama’s Cabinet. On paper, this character is classic Brooks: brilliant, neurotic, overworked, painfully earnest, occasionally insufferable. A Holly Hunter-style protagonist for the next generation. Mackey has the raw talent for it—her body language alone can communicate five emotions and a tax form—but the script hands her a personality made of bullet points instead of contradictions.
Ella is passionate enough to admire and abrasive enough to interrogate, but the film keeps pushing her toward cartoonish extremes. Every speech becomes a filibuster. Every conversation becomes a steamroller. Watching her acceptance remarks devolve into a rapid-fire list of wonky policy items made me wince—not because it wasn’t realistic, but because the film never earns her intensity. Brooks used to let characters spiral into vulnerability with the precision of an orchestra conductor. Here, it feels like the sheet music got jammed in the printer.
Worse, the world around her doesn’t make sense. Her marriage to Ryan, played by Jack Lowden with the docile golden-retriever energy of a man who would happily laminate his wife’s spreadsheets, is supposed to be the emotional backbone. Yet the film never explains how these two people found each other, much less stayed together for more than a decade. Their dynamic isn’t mismatched in the way interesting couples are mismatched; it’s mismatched in the way late-stage rewrites accidentally create incompatible character files. When the story later demands a dramatic twist involving Ryan, it feels less like tragedy and more like watching a puzzle piece forcibly jammed into the wrong board game.
Family dysfunction is another Brooks trademark—think Terms of Endearment, think Broadcast News, think every father-daughter reconciliation scene that made you ugly cry in the 80s. Ella McCay tries to tap that emotional reservoir through Ella’s estranged brother Casey and their philandering father Eddie. The problem is that none of it lands with the authenticity Brooks usually conjures effortlessly.
Spike Fearn’s Casey is a muddled character defined mostly by mumbling, sports betting, and plot contrivance. The film spends an astonishing amount of time on his agoraphobic tendencies and his barely-sketched romance with Ayo Edebiri, who is wholly wasted in a role that gives her two scenes and zero motivation. Watching Edebiri attempt to generate chemistry with a character who barely registers on-screen is one of the sadder artifacts of the movie. You can see her talent reaching for something real. The script just doesn’t give her anything to grab.
Woody Harrelson’s Eddie fares slightly better, mostly because Harrelson can generate emotional history just by shifting his posture. But the attempts at reconciliation feel like story checkpoints rather than revelations. Brooks once built entire emotional universes out of parents and children circling old wounds. Here, the scenes feel like placeholders for ideas the movie never fully excavates.
If there’s one thing Brooks has always excelled at, it’s assembling ensembles where every actor, even the one delivering coffee in the background, feels like a fully realized person. Ella McCay is the first time I’ve seen a Brooks cast look collectively stranded. Kumail Nanjiani gets a role that seems intended to be warm, witty, and quietly grounding, but he’s functionally a human security badge with occasional lines. Mackey, Lowden, Harrelson—they’re all playing characters waiting for someone to hand them a scene objective. Only Jamie Lee Curtis escapes this gravitational pull of blandness, simply by unleashing pure, chaotic Jamie Lee Curtis energy that the movie seems too timid to exploit properly.
Setting the story in the hopeful glow of early-Obama America is a clever idea on its face. If you’re making a movie about idealism, why not situate it at a moment when idealism still felt like a real political currency? But in practice, the period setting makes everything feel strangely fossilized. The optimism doesn’t read as nostalgia. It reads as denial.
Brooks hasn’t lost his sensitivity to human flaws, but he seems to have misplaced his calibration for contemporary storytelling. Instead of feeling timeless, Ella McCay feels stuck—caught between the kind of adult drama Hollywood no longer invests in and the modern rhythms it doesn’t know how to incorporate. The result is a movie that resembles its era not by design, but because it’s incapable of evolving past it.
The hardest part of watching Ella McCay is realizing that Brooks hasn’t lost his curiosity—just his precision. His characters still talk like they’re halfway through a life-changing epiphany. His scenes still linger. His emotional instincts still want to crack something open. But the film never crystallizes into the incisive, humanistic dramedy it clearly aims to be.
It hurts to say this as someone who has rewound the Broadcast News meltdown scene more times than is considered socially acceptable: Ella McCay isn’t merely a disappointing return. It’s a painful reminder of how delicate Brooks’ storytelling alchemy always was, and how tragically it can collapse when the chemistry is off by even a few degrees.
