After 15 years, James L. Brooks makes his unlikely return to feature filmmaking with Ella McCay. His last film, 2010’s How Do You Know, was the bumbling and exhausted mess you expect from directors near the end of their careers, the kind of movie that Quentin Tarantino talks about when he justifies his own early retirement. It’s a fair point, because a lousy movie (or a confused mess like I’ll Do Anything) can drag a filmography down; Brooks has made three classics (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets), a great movie that never got its due (Spanglish), and those two oddballs, those bombers, those underachieving sneakers. Among such distinguished company, these misfit movies make for a compelling meta-Brooks film that will never be.
In 42 years, he’s only made seven movies, including Ella McCay, which isn’t quite as good as Spanglish but far outpaces How Did You Know and I’ll Do Anything. Emma Mackey stars as the titular politician, made governor of her unnamed home state (though clearly Rhode Island, where they shot the film, or Massachusetts) after her boss (Albert Brooks) resigns. The movie takes place in 2008, when the narrator (Julie Kavner) says, “We all still liked each other.” Even she notes the “Great Recession,” but as rosy and old-fashioned as this movie is, she’s not wrong that 2008 was a much more cohesive and less hostile time in daily American life; anyone saying otherwise wasn’t there or is willfully dishonest. I don’t expect Brooks to have anything to say about our moment, even when he’s making movies about politicians—in other words, not about politics.
Broadcast News was similarly safe and obsolete by the time it came out in 1987, 11 years after Paddy Chayefsky’s epic and terrifying Network, but it didn’t matter because Broadcast News is about its characters. It has as little to do with syndicated news as Spanglish has to do with restaurants, or As Good As It Gets with writers. But more than anything, the trailer for Ella McCay was widely mocked, and a familiar sentiment emerged from the public, the same one that oozes out whenever anybody “too old” shows up: “Why don’t they just retire?” Tarantino has said that the public’s anger at him for retiring early has to do with the barely subconscious desire to enforce the unspoken contract that the audience gets to decide when the stars are done, not the other way around. Every time Tarantino opens his mouth and does something shocking—like, for example, give an opinion on a given actor—it’s covered around the world, proving his own point: he’s far more famous and powerful keeping himself in the pink than if he were burning himself out making a movie or two every few years.
Brooks has been busy overseeing The Simpsons, but he’s been working on Ella McCay for years. Typical: this guy barely finished the movie on time, like always, and probably cut and re-cut it dozens and dozens of times after test screenings and sleepless nights and frazzled days spent fretting over a syllable or a wink. The most disappointing aspect of How Did You Know was it looked like he didn’t care, that maybe he wasn’t making 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 takes of major scenes; if his pace has slowed to 20, Ella McCay is still yet another example of Brooks’ precision filmmaking, an oeuvre made up of the most true and interesting moments, pieces of human behavior as nuanced and compelling as any car chase or overwrought melodrama. Mackey’s McCay doesn’t go through much in the movie (besides an interrupted flashback where her mother dies) besides finally breaking up with her idiot asshole husband (Jack Lowden, echoing Jeff Daniels in Terms of Endearment, albeit way nastier) and lose the governorship she only had for three days. Her work in politics will continue.
But Ella’s career isn’t the focus of the film: it’s the ensemble. Jamie Lee Curtis, who I’ve never liked, gives the best performance of her career here. She understands the Brooksian Touch completely, finally putting her high-wire histrionics, which most often read as smug and hostile, to good use. Mackey, Lowden, and Curtis are supported by Kumail Nanjiani, Woody Harrelson, Julie Kavner, Albert Brooks, Spike Fearn, and Ayo Edebiri, all in small roles, with some (Edebiri) getting just one scene. Harrelson’s part looks like the victim of reshoots and recuts, but the movie never tips into self-parody or even mediocrity. It is, in its rejection of not just today’s cinema but today itself, a more real movie than One Battle After Another or Materialists. Ari Aster’s Eddington may be funnier, smarter, and, on the whole, more enjoyable than Ella McCay, but Brooks’ film is a necessary counterpoint to Aster’s acidic edge. None of the older actors here are phoning it in, either: Brooks, Kavner, Curtis, and Harrelson are all clearly thrilled to be working with the man behind Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good As It Gets.
It’s widely rumored that 20th Century Studios only greenlit Ella McCay if Brooks agreed to make a second Simpsons Movie, already announced and dated for summer 2027. You scratch our back, we scratch your back—and the millions of devotees of the Brooksian Touch around the world! Like friend Rob Reiner, Brooks’ classics are cornerstones of American popular culture, and if his film is slagged and underappreciated and misunderstood now in the same way that Stanley Kubrick’s films were in theirs, then life for Ella McCay can only improve. Brooks, 85, likely won’t make another movie, but I hope he does, because he hasn’t lost it, and he’ll still do anything for the magical take.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith