<i>Ella McCay</i> — Hollywood’s Definitive Disaster

Future politicians should study Ella McCay and learn how to avoid being too on-the-nose with their self-righteous rhetoric. Surprisingly, the Oscars' rejection of Ella McCay defies every woke expectation. Its story flatters 34-year-old Ella (Emma Mackey), who becomes her unnamed state’s youngest governor. Writer-director James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Simpsons, Broadcast News, As Good as It Gets) makes his first film in 15 years by checking every Hollywood liberal box: Me Too feminism, racial diversity, progressive social storylines. (Ella’s autism-spectrum brother, the brother's black girlfriend-nursemaid, plus an adoring Asian state-trooper chauffeur provide utterly embarrassing subplots.) Yet these calculations flopped; Ella McCay vanished after its initial awards-season opening but now resurfaces in a last-ditch home Blu-ray release.

It was impossible for Brooks to recapture The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s good vibes, since that quaint Minneapolis setting is now exposed as a hellhole of waste, fraud, and incipient civil war. But his problem is stranger than simply bad timing. Neither the public nor Academy Awards members could get behind Brooks and his extreme disavowal of real-world politics.

The liberal sentimentality at the base of Brooks’s comedy (his past near-genius alertness to common human folly and the quirks of egotism that separate us from family, co-workers, and outsiders) feels slickly wrought and self-satisfied. The wit that influenced the TV series Modern Family and the film Jerry Maguire becomes so mechanical, so obvious in Ella McCay that it fails to satisfy the superiority complex that feeds liberal sanctimoniousness. Thus, Brooks’s title homage to Robert Redford’s reluctant pol “Bill McKay” in The Candidate, from 1972.

Ella’s commitment to improving the political system she participates in proves her identity as a feminist standard-bearer. She insists on ending fundraiser phone rooms and promotes pre-K education — Hollywood’s first explicit depiction (endorsement) of contemporary liberal policy.

However, the circumstances of Ella’s rise to power trivialize some of the worst political developments in recent times. Brooks whitewashes Kathy Hochul’s similar promotion from New York’s lieutenant governor to governor after Andrew Cuomo was ousted, ignoring noted sex scandals among Democratic Party liberals. (Cuomo’s perfidies are replaced with the nice-guy careerism of Ella’s mentor -- Albert Brooks repeating his cynical-mensch routine from Broadcast News.) Ella McCay substitutes a supposedly farcical charade of gender conflict — starting with Ella’s disapproval of her adulterous father (Woody Harrelson) and disappointment with her own weak-minded, envious husband, Ryan (Jack Lowden).

Ella McCay is set in 2008 to reflect that year’s “hope and change” election of Barack Obama. Brooks’s liberal audience might not have accepted a satire of its sacred cow, but it doesn’t help that Ella McCay denies them any means of connecting to its premise except through mild, vague resemblances. At age 85, Brooks may not be a hive-mind creature, yet he stumbles into clichés that James Sweeney avoided in Twinless and Eva Victor twisted in Sorry, Baby. This comedy lacks a cutting edge.

All the political delusions that obsess contemporary Hollywood are displayed to no avail, but Brooks misreads the moment. He casts British actors Mackey and Lowden, losing the innate cultural and behavioral recognition that might have made the film a hit. Mackey’s natural European exoticism doesn’t evoke the American Karen defensiveness so apparent in nepotistic, partisan-machine hacks Kathy Hochul, Gretchen Whitmer, Mikie Sherrill, and Abigail Spanberger. Brooks camouflages Ella’s college-grad duplicity with unconvincing niceness. There’s an unhealthy amount of gender superiority in Ella’s kinship with her deferential mother (Rebecca Hall), her elderly aide de camp (Julie Kavner), and her know-it-all maiden-aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis). These feminist role models are as unprepossessing as Ella’s husband, a doofus readily referred to by the term “douche.” (But Ella muzzles her husband’s attempt to utter the word “bitch” during a private dispute in the state capitol.)

Instead of teasing the gender switch that was the subject of Kisses for My President (1961), Ella confronts her own “Little Miss Nooner” scandal of having “marital relations” in a government office during lunchtime, and she accidentally gets stoned on her brother’s cannabis products. It’s Brooks’s cute way of ignoring the Democratic page’s buggery in Senate chambers and the unclaimed cocaine in the Biden White House. He forsakes the topical daring of The Simpsons to favor a pandering disregard of infamous, unlawful political reality.

Following the legacy media’s radical, licentious, progressive bias, Brooks campaigns for Ella’s superior politics, which hinge on a bogus instance of rejecting her stupid husband’s readiness to capitulate to media blackmail. It’s the same egotism that ruined Broadcast News. Ella’s new platform is an exaggeration of Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” spiel: “I can make people’s lives better. I know exactly what needs to be done in this new job. We need to attract new businesses, and you can’t do that with substandard roads and ports, and you can’t do that unless you maybe jack way up license and registration fees, especially for commercial vehicles.”

But Brooks is most disingenuous when Ella summarizes that “you can’t be popular and fix anything.” Implying that Ella is too honest for politics and that “the people” are too dumb to appreciate a savvy leader can’t work both ways. “You’re poking them in their limitations” warns Albert Brooks, smiling like the old man in Pixar’s Up. This doesn’t wash after Covid lockdowns, lawfare, and the Biden disaster years during which Ella McCay was filmed.

That tyrannical experience is erased by Brooks condescending to feminism, overlooking the immigration crisis that was central to his best film, Adam Sandler’s Spanglish. Ella falls back on the obnoxious, super-journalist, know-it-all traits that Holly Hunter epitomized in Broadcast News. (Ella’s arrogance is a family defect traceable to Aunt Helen, whose withering put-downs of everyone come off as nagging -- an eccentricity that Cloris Leachman’s wise-grandma role redeemed in Spanglish.) Brooks punishes any sympathetic male, such as the virtuous, career-struggling actor-dad of I’ll Do Anything, possibly Nick Nolte’s finest performance.

In his former brilliance, Brooks rarely made a misstep (except for the bogus POV edit controversy in Broadcast News or the Simpsons episode that proclaimed, “Republicans want what’s worse for everyone, Democrats can’t govern”). But now, Brooks’s wit has devolved into tone-deaf sarcasm redolent of today’s fractious period.

The Oscars seem confused by Hollywood’s sharpest wit bungling so obviously -- hence the rejection of Ella McCay — a freakish reaction that coincided with the killing of Rob Reiner, whose rom-coms were banal versions of Brooks. Reiner’s tragedy didn’t shake Hollywood; instead, the industry shrugged it off, making immediate excuses the same way that Brooks idealizes feminism through the political chicanery of Ella and Aunt Helen.

This film celebrates the sanctimonious sham-humanism that leftists invoke when attacking their opponents. (Croaky-voiced Kavner rejoices, “It took a while, but Ella got exactly what she fought for: the ‘Moms’ bill.’”) Kavner’s concluding advice -- “Forget all that good stuff about forgiving. There’s no opposite word for ‘trauma,’ but ‘hope’ comes close” -- refers us back to Obama, the left’s last hope. Foul as it is, Ella McCay outclasses all the movies nominated for Oscars. Is this disastrous waste of talent and imagination the best that Millennial Hollywood can do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJYPGhJDjaU