I should have taken notice of the horrific opening weekend for Ella McCay – just $2 million return on a $35 million budget. But it seemed unfair to ignore a new picture by the Oscar-winning writer-director of Terms of Endearment (1983), Broadcast News (1987) and As Good As It Gets (1997). Maybe I should have taken into account his cinematic rustiness, this is his first picture in 15 years, though that’s leavened by the fact he’s not exactly been prolific, including this a career spanning just eight pictures, so this could just be another gem a long time in the making.
Alas, no. It’s an unholy mess. From the set-up it presents as an expose of politics in the sharply satirical manner of Broadcast News. But all we learn about politics is the amount of time politicians spend drumming up money from sponsors in boiler rooms filled with begging employees working the phone and that be careful who you choose as a running mate because if the top person dies or – in this case – gets promoted, you’re left with someone nobody voted for and who has such little grasp of the humans she’s meant to be working for that in her ideological frenzy she bores everyone to death.
This looks as if it started one way and went another. A simple plot device could have been used to explore the problems of politicians squaring family lives with duty. Ella McCay (Emma Mackey) – promoted to governor of an unnamed state because the incumbent, Bill (Albert Brooks), is promoted elsewhere – has been caught out using a room in the government building to have lunchtime sex with restaurateur husband Ryan (Jack Lowden).
This might have done wonders for her career, given she’s such a stuffy uptight lady, and the issue would have deserved no more than a mild slap on the wrist for illicit use of government property, and highlighted the problems of work-life balance in the business. Instead, it’s forced to do triple duty in a bizarre manner.
A journalist with so little grasp of politics is dumb enough to think this is actually an expose worth blackmailing someone over. And a politician with so little grasp of PR is dumb enough to think this poses a threat. And a husband with probably a very good grasp of how business works tries to pay off said journalist only for the whole farrago to explode in everyone’s face and result in a vengeful husband instigating divorce proceedings and blaming her for the bribery.
Oh dear, these bad men damaging a young woman’s promising career. Except the head of her political party calling her to book is a woman and it’s Ryan’s mother who puts him on collision course with his wife. Ella is just tone-deaf to everyone except herself. In her inauguration speech she fails to thank Bill or her husband and in her first meeting with her staff drones on for so long fails to notice they are falling asleep.
It’s not just Ella who’s tone-deaf it’s the director. There’s a just terrible scene where having decided to spend the night at her brother’s apartment she fails to notify her police guard and then blasts them in the morning for watching over her overnight and wasting taxpayer’s money by clocking up overtime and this is presented as if in fact her anger is proof of her innate goodness.
Rammed into this bizarre concoction is estranged dad Eddie (Woody Harrelson) whom Ella refuses to forgive for his womanizing – and in fact the only scene that actually carries any heft is the one where as a teenager she refuses to play the happy family game when he’s been caught out in a misdemeanor.
Oh, and while we’re at it, her brother Casey (Spike Fearn), an agoraphobic computer geek who happens to pocket $2 million a year on a spread betting hustle, is on hand to listen (unwillingly it has to be said) to her self-justifying rants and effort is put in to justifying his continued presence in the picture with a dumb plugged-in romance.
The main problem is that mostly Ella is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, constantly whining, bursting into tears (or screaming – the apparent alternative) and what sets out to show how women are constricted in politics actually instead reveals how someone constitutionally unfit for the hard graft of politics becomes a liability. But, wait, hooray, she does good in the end.
Everyone overacts. So there’s no excuse except directorial slackness for usually dependable actors like Woody Harrelson (Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, 2025) and Jamie Lee Curtis (The Last Showgirl, 2024) and for Emma Mackey (Emily, 2022), face in constant fidget, inexperience might mitigate. Jack Lowden (Tornado, 2025), done no favors by the script, and veteran Albert Brooks (Concussion, 2015), in his first movie in a decade, are better, but that’s not saying much.
Just awful. American moviegoers were right to give this a body swerve.
The Magnificent 60s 