I’m really and truly sorry, but the just-popped trailer for James L. Brooks‘ Ella McCay (20th Century, 12.12) feels decidedly off in certain ways.
And I’m saying this as a serious die-hard fan of the great Brooks films of the ’80s and ’90s (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets)…all brilliant, incisive, emotional empathy scenarios that wrestled with real-life adult stuff, and in a way that really and truly touched the bottom of the pool.
I’m sorry but there’s just something what-the-fucky about the simultaneous mixture of the following:
(a) A neurotic, emotionally truculent family dramedy about 40-plus adults (one significant exception being the titular character) dealing with unresolved failings and repressed anger plus an anguished, darkly humored tolerance of same;
(b) The film seemingly or primarily leaning upon a trusting mother-daughter relationship…the high-strung, emotionally fraught central character — a driven, pushing-30 political careerist — played by Emma Mackey plus the stalwart, silver-haired, mid-60ish Jamie Lee Curtis;
(c) The name of the titular character sharing the same kind of WASPy ethnicity, the same initials and the same number of syllables as Mackey…Ella McCay is apparently a non-elected colleague of some kind …some kind of managerial, high-level ally of “Governor Bill” (the white-haired Albert Brooks) who’s somehow taking over as governor when “Bill” has to leave office for some unspecified reason (poor health? sexual malfeasance?), plus…
(d) The principal offender being a selfish, stubbornly immature, moderately deplorable older male played by the 60ish Woody Harrelson, the father of Mackey’s McCay.
Plus the vaguely irksome Ayo Edibiri…forget it, not going there.
What the hell is this, man?
I’m good with the punchy, soul-baring family turbulence stuff but we all understand that lieutenant governors succeed governors when a resignation occurs, and not a trusted colleague or political manager or protector in the tradition of, say, who Rahm Emmanuel was while serving Barack Obama during the first couple of years of that adminstration.
Principal photography, mind, began in Rhode Island on 2.1.24, and it wrapped three months later on 5.3.24, and yet extensive additional filming began eight months later (i.e., January through March 2025), not just in Rhode Island but also in Cleveland and New Orleans. What does that tell you?
In March ’25 Julie Kavner, Becky Ann Baker and Joey Brooks (the director’s son) were revealed to be cast additions.
In the trailer the long-of-tooth Kavner, portraying a longtime assistant of McCay, self-announces as the film’s narrator, which indicates that Brooks decided that the movie needed a narrator during the early ’25 extra-filming period, which is always a sign of trouble.
