‘Ella McCay’ Review: Emma Mackey Shines in James L. Brooks’s Uneven Return

James L. Brooks’s career includes some of the most significant productions of the past half-century in American film and television. Movies like Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good as It Gets became classics thanks to a distinctive style rooted in the finest traditions of comedy-drama. Like the recently deceased Rob Reiner—who worked in a similar vein—Brooks came to filmmaking from television, having co-created landmarks such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and later on, nothing less than The Simpsons. His long career also includes a fair share of misfires (I’ll Do Anything, How Do You Know?) and, above all, a prolonged period of silence. Although his name has continued to appear as a producer on various films, he hadn’t directed a movie since 2010.

Ella McCay marks Brooks’s return to cinema and to classical comedy, boasting a cast that would be the envy of almost any filmmaker. Released in the United States at the end of the year, the film was met with lukewarm reviews, went largely unnoticed in theaters, and virtually vanished from screens within days. It now resurfaces via streaming, perhaps the most suitable venue for what—beyond the marquee names—is a somewhat uneven comedy-drama: a pleasant curiosity that doesn’t live up to Brooks’s best work, but is also nowhere near the disaster suggested by its abysmal critical scores.

Played by British actress Emma Mackey (Sex Education), Ella McCay is not the protagonist of a self-referential metacomedy or a postmodern alter ego exercise. Instead, the film presents—through a loose, almost panoramic structure—a series of episodes from the life of a woman who, in the film’s present (set in 2008), serves as the right-hand person to Governor Bill (Albert Brooks, another comedy legend and co-star of Broadcast News). Early on, Bill announces that he’s been tapped for a position in the national cabinet and will hand over the governorship to Ella until the next election.

The problem is that Ella is in no emotional shape to accept the job. While she is a dedicated, almost obsessive “political animal”—to the point that many find her dull, weighed down by long, overly detailed speeches and lacking in popular charisma—the thirty-something politician is struggling on multiple fronts. Her assistant and the film’s narrator, Estelle (Julie Kavner, yet another comedy icon and the original voice of Marge Simpson), explains that Ella’s issues date back to adolescence, when her father (Woody Harrelson) cheated on her mother (Rebecca Hall), upending the lives of both Ella and her brother (played as an adult by Spike Fearn) through a series of damaging personal decisions.

That backstory helps explain her present-day emotional turmoil. Ella is estranged from her father, who is desperate to reconcile; her brother is dealing with romantic and personal complications of his own; and, most critically, she is in trouble with her husband (Jack Lowden, Slow Horses) after an intimate detail of their private life becomes public and threatens to erupt into a career-ending political scandal. Her emotional support system consists mainly of Estelle, her driver and bodyguard Nash (a very underused Kumail Nanjiani), and especially her aunt Helen, the eccentric owner of a local bar, played by Jamie Lee Curtis with the high-voltage intensity that seems to have become her default mode in recent years.

Somewhat arbitrarily, the film weaves all these subplots together, positioning itself as a retro throwback to Frank Capra’s 1930s political comedies—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in particular—as well as later variations on the theme like Dave or The American President, all of them focused on the tension between public office and private life. Set in a time when, as the narrator puts it, “despite the crisis, we still got along,” the movie opts for a tone that is more warm than cynical, more gentle than biting. It toys with political dirty tricks while criticizing leaders and lawmakers who are more concerned with avoiding trouble, raising money, and securing reelection than with addressing people’s real needs and problems.

Yet Brooks ultimately places greater emphasis on McCay’s personal life, devoting considerable screen time to a subplot about her brother’s romantic entanglements (featuring Ayo Edebiri of The Bear) that might well have been left on the cutting-room floor. The film also circles repeatedly around her conflicts with her father and husband—two overly caricatured characters who stretch the story’s credibility to its limits. Mackey—who bears a striking resemblance to Margot Robbie—throws all her energy and charm into a character straight out of classical comedy, and her performance helps keep afloat a narrative that frequently threatens to spring leaks.

Ella McCay is a modest, good-natured effort, riddled with narrative issues and uneven performances, but buoyed by an affable tone and a formal classicism that recalls the kind of adult-oriented comedies once common in theaters during the 1980s and ’90s—movies that have since slowly and sadly disappeared. The near-coincidence between the film’s commercial failure and the unexpected, mournful death of Rob Reiner feels like a telling sign that this particular kind of cinema may be gone for good.