Review: Ella McCay

I know pretty much nothing about James L. Brooks. Most of what I do know is actually about Albert Brooks, who I keep getting him mixed up with. I could definitely free associate the names “Mary Tyler Moore”, “Taxi”, or “Homer, Bart, and Marge” if you brought him up. But my awareness ends there. So basically you should discount whatever follows here because it’s coming from a guy who would write a review of a James L. Brooks movie while thinking he was in Drive.

There was construction on my street today and they turned my apartment’s water off for the day. That’s the type of thing that stresses me out, so I decided I might as well try to get out of the house for a few hours and see a movie, which would furnish me with a distraction and a working toilet. The window of time I needed to fill presented me with two options: Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 or Ella McCay. I figured that Five Nights might have a lot of jump scares that could negatively stimulate my bowels and create a situation when I returned home to my out-of-order bathroom. These are the type of criteria many moviegoers overlook. You need to have a calculus beyond “I want to see that” for situations where you are forced to see a movie semi-against your will.

So I saw Ella McCay, a movie I never foresaw watching. I had caught the trailer for it a couple times and thought it looked like a fun schmaltzy family drama. Maybe I missed something, but I had no idea it mainly centered around a political sex scandal. I really had a hard time understanding why this movie was the way that it was. To say it felt like it was pulling in multiple directions would be wrong, because ‘pulling’ is too active a word. If I were to try to describe the project of Ella McCay charitably, I might use phrases like “radical sentimentality”. In this review, though, I’m going to use phrases like “total tonal puzzlement”.

You can kind of feel the intended rhythm peeking through some of the dialogue, but it’s cobbled together in a way that feels like they had to cut around a lot of first takes. The humor is funny at times but is more often than not sluggish and flat. I think the tone is intended to be arch, but nobody is quite pulling their weight, so it mostly comes off as geriatric. Sometimes in movies, it seems like characters are doing things for no reason, but the reason is that the story needs them to do that. Sometimes in Ella McCay, characters do things for no reason.

Ella herself spends most of the movie blustering her way through a world of irredeemable dopes and sarcastic good influences, narrated by Marge herself, Julie Kavner (one of the latter). Ella is a politician who all the other politicians hate because she makes them look bad because she’s the only one who will come out and say “I think politicians shouldn’t ask for money.” I guess the narrative arc largely centered around her realizing it was okay not to forgive some of the scumbags in her life, and maybe that she should take a chill pill. I’m not confident in that diagnosis because those things either were already true at the beginning of the movie, or hadn’t yet happened by the end.

An off-the-wall dramedy like this should be studded with memorable characters. I’ll probably remember at least the name Ella McCay for a couple weeks, but the rest of the cast is already fading. I remember Ella McCay’s brother was named Casey and I remember that he was quirky. I remember that her aunt was quirky. And I remember that Kumail Nanjiani’s character was sweet and kind. Well, and a little quirky too. Maybe by typing things like this I can reinforce my neural pathways and immortalize the dramatis personae of Ella McCay in my mind. Maybe they can live in my brain and do little weird reactions to each other’s dialogue forever. Most likely not.

There were two separate groups of people in my theater who seemingly came to see this movie ironically. They laughed uproariously when Ayo Edebiri appeared onscreen, before she even said a word. I did not like this movie but that made me feel bad for not liking it. One of the laughers said snarkily, as credits rolled, “I actually loved it… Like it wasn’t good but… I actually loved it.” That is a bleak fate for a movie. When I heard that person say that, it pissed me off. Because come on. You didn’t actually love it.

I don’t feel very strongly about Ella McCay. I thought it sucked. But I did have access to a toilet for the duration of the film. I’d like to get into the habit of writing about new releases. This just happened to be the first one. The urge to write about a movie can be fickle, and I pledge to follow it wherever it takes me. One and a half stars.