If Ella McCay had been made twenty years ago, it would have seemed like an antique, but the whiskers are really showing in 2025, even if they try to date the film somewhat by setting it in 2008, making its political milieu less fraught (the movie\u2019s one sharp line is when Julie Kavner\u2019s narrator remembers it as \u201cthe time before we all hated each other\u201d). Emma Mackey definitely seems like a star on the rise (she\u2019ll be in Greta Gerwig\u2019s Narnia movie<\/a>), but she\u2019s saddled with an impossible role\u2014McCay is the kind of incredibly sunny optimist who\u2019s so na\u00efve it makes the notion of her political ascendancy impossible to swallow. This is a movie where McKay gasps in surprise when she realizes her brother smokes marijuana, and when she gets high for the first time, it\u2019s unlike any weed experience even loosely tied to reality\u2014about as cartoonish as when the centurions get high in Mel Brooks\u2019 History of the World: Part I.<\/p>\n The whole film feels false from the get-go, with McCay an impossibly sweet, kind heroine without any character flaws whatsoever. She\u2019s like the protagonist of a Doris Day movie circa 1960. Mackey is charming, but she\u2019s playing a cartoon. The same could be said for Jamie Lee Curtis as her supportive aunt\/surrogate mother, who\u2019s portrayed as a somewhat sweeter version of Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment.<\/p>\n The male characters are even worse. Woody Harrelson plays McCay\u2019s dad, whom the movie expects us to view as a \u201chilarious\u201d deadbeat, but he comes off as almost psychotic\u2014we watch him flirt with women at his dead wife\u2019s funeral in flashbacks, not in a mean way, mind you, more in a \u201cwow, what a character\u201d kind of way. No actor alive could make this palatable, and Harrelson looks embarrassed.<\/p>\n Jack Lowden, as McCay\u2019s longtime husband Ryan, somehow comes off even worse\u2014maybe the least palatable screen husband since Eric Roberts in Star 80. He\u2019s portrayed as so insecure about his wife\u2019s elevation to governor that he launches into a campaign of seedy scheming, making it hard to swallow that McCay\u2014who everyone keeps reminding us is so smart\u2014wouldn\u2019t have seen through him in eighteen years together. Again, he\u2019s supposed to be \u201ccharming,\u201d but Lowden plays him utterly without any of that quality. Brooks also stages much of the film in flashback, meaning we get a lot of scenes of the thirty-five-year-old Lowden and twenty-nine-year-old Mackey playing sixteen-year-olds. <\/p>\n As if the movie didn\u2019t have enough subplots, there\u2019s also loads of time devoted to Spike Fearn as Casey, McCay\u2019s ne\u2019er-do-well younger brother, who\u2019s trying to win back his ex, played by Ayo Edebiri. Their reunion scene\u2014delivered with dialogue that would be sinister in any other movie\u2014is staged as sugary sweet here.<\/p>\n However, two cast members somehow walk out unscathed. One is Kumail Nanjiani as the nice-guy trooper on McCay\u2019s detail; in a better version of this movie, he would have been the leading man. The other is Albert Brooks, who plays McCay\u2019s boss, the acid-tongued but sympathetic Governor Bill, in a role that had to have been earmarked for Nicholson. He acquits himself nicely in a Nicholson-esque part, and his scenes are the only ones with the kind of bite that remind you how good James L. Brooks used to be at this kind of material.<\/p>\n Ella McCay is the director\u2019s first movie in fifteen years, but rather than a solid return to form, it\u2019s a movie people should have advised him against making. It will be ravaged by critics. It\u2019s the kind of movie you feel embarrassed watching.<\/p>\n \n Subscribe to our weekly newsletter\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/ella-mccay-1-1024x538.jpg\")
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