Everything I Remember About ‘Ella McCay’

In the poster advertising the new film Ella McCay, a woman stands on one leg, her mid-length coat waving around her, as she gently touches the back of the high heel of her left shoe. Her other arm is extended up and out for balance. It is such a strange position that people have begun posing like her as a challenge. What could this movie possibly be about? Was it about shoes? Was it about imbalance? Who the hell is Ella McCay? 

These were the questions that haunted me when I went to New Jersey on Saturday to find out. I traveled to the closest theater playing Ella McCay, bought a giant popcorn and giant soda, and settled in. The 2:00 p.m. showing, one day after the movie’s release, was almost entirely empty. There were seven other people in the theater, and my friend and I (both in our 30s) were a full two decades younger than any of them. 

Ella McCay is the first feature-length film in 15 years by the comedic legend James L. Brooks. He is the co-creator of The Simpsons, and he directed, wrote and produced the Best Picture winner Terms of Endearment. This movie is neither of those. I would say it is perhaps closest to his work on Spanglish, but that is frankly rude to Spanglish. No, Ella McCay is impossible to compare to Brooks’s other work because it exists in a kind of fever dream. It isn’t funny, and it doesn't make any sense.

After seeing the movie, I went to have a negroni to recover some of my sanity. While at the bar, I mentioned the movie, and someone asked me what it was about. What was it about? I had just seen it, but I didn’t know what to say! I still am not really sure. 

Here are some things I know about the movie Ella McCay: 

• Ella McCay is a period piece set in 2008, which the narration calls in the first 30 seconds “a better time. We all still liked each other.” This is how you know the movie is a demented fantasy. The president who has just been elected in Ella McCay remains unnamed, because there's no way that you can remember Barack Obama's presidency and at the same time believe that statement.
• The whole movie is narrated by Ella’s secretary. Ella's secretary is played by Julie Kavner, who is best known for voicing Marge Simpson. The movie is narrated by Marge Simpson.
• The actress who plays Ella McCay is named Emma Mackey in real life. This is confusing. Emma Mackey looks a lot like Margot Robbie in a brown wig. I am still not certain that she is not Margot Robbie in a brown wig. If I were Margot Robbie, I wouldn't want my name on this movie either!
• Ella becomes governor of “the state in which she was born and raised,” because the current governor gets appointed to the president’s cabinet. At no point is this state named. All of the badges and crests and flags are non-specific. I came out of the movie assuming she was the governor of Michigan. My friend assumed she was the governor of New Jersey. Ella McCay, where are you?!
• We are told at least five times during the movie that Ella McCay is 34 years old. This has no relevance to the plot. The youngest governor in America right now (I'm sorry) is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was 40 at inauguration, so theoretically it's stunning that Ella McCay is 34. But this context is not in the movie, and no one in the movie seems to care that she's young and hot because they are all too busy thinking she's annoying!
• Whenever Emma Mackey plays young Ella McCay, she has bangs. Otherwise, she looks exactly the same. 
• In one scene as young Ella, her father is "retiring" from working for a hospital (or being a doctor? I can't really remember, to be honest, because this was not important). Really, he is resigning for having an affair. Ella does not want to go to the retirement celebration/resignation, and she doesn’t want her younger brother to go either, so she takes him over to the family dictionary and reads him the definition of the word “trauma.” I am 99 percent sure that the words "trauma" and "traumatic experience" were not being used by teenagers in 1990, but I don't know for sure, because I wasn't born yet.
• Ella’s whole character development is based on an A+ paper she wrote for her high school sociology class, on which her teacher wrote “YOU CAN BE A FORCE FOR GOOD.” The paper is titled “Can There Be Morality in Politics?” This is a question the movie pretty clearly answers with "No."
• In the present (2008), Ella faces a PR crisis. The crisis is that she was banging her husband in a spare apartment (?) in the state capitol during lunch breaks, which is against the law. For this behavior, the press will later give her the nickname “Little Miss Nooner." I have never heard anyone use the word nooner, so I'm forced to assume it is archaic slang from the far, far past of 2008.
• Ella is disliked by everyone, because she’s a smartass and a tightass and she just cares too much. Her own party hates her because she holds them accountable. The other party also hates her for being annoying. What party is Ella McCay the governor for? Don't worry about it! That's not relevant here in this movie about politics!
• For the first 30 minutes of the film, Ella never takes her coat off. She wears it to the bar to see her deadbeat dad, in her aunt’s house, back at the capitol, and in the press scrum after she is announced as governor. This is because she is a WOMAN ON THE MOVE. Women on the move cannot remove their coats! They are on their way out the door!
• Jamie Lee Curtis plays Ella’s adoring and stable aunt, Helen. We learn that Ella’s husband is bad, because Helen dislikes him. She dislikes him because he bragged about making an extra $300,000 last year by “watering down” his “tomato sauce.” Later, it is revealed that he owns a pizza restaurant.
• Ella’s brother does not attend her inauguration because he is agoraphobic as a result of a bad breakup. Ella goes to try to talk to him. While there, she accidentally drinks a weed lemonade and eats a weed cookie. Ella does NOT like being high! And the voice-over narration tells us that Ella campaigned against the state’s now-legal marijuana. What's incredible is that weed does not make uptight Ella chill and calm. It makes her wide-eyed and manic. Weed is like coke to her! She should not do it! Someone make Ella McCay stop doing the coke weed!
• Ella’s brother is making $2 million a year using his MIT degree to help people gamble on sports. Why isn't he gambling on sports himself with his methods? Why does this use up over a dozen hours every day? How does he have a football game on a tiny screen on his computer in 2008? DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT! THIS IS ELLA MCCAY!
• Despite being rich and smart, Ella’s brother is NOT OKAY. The proof of this is that he has a few dishes in his sink, some dirty laundry, and a few trash bags piled up. Otherwise, his apartment is nicer and better decorated than any other 22-year-old boy's apartment I’ve ever seen. He has a bed frame!
• At one point Aunt Helen says, “The problem with being a tightass is you never know when the ass is right.” 
• Kumail Nanjiani plays a state trooper who runs Ella’s security detail. At one point, he spends a full two minutes listing free things you could do with a child, in the tone of a joke but without a punchline. I genuinely must know who he owed a favor to so badly that he ended up in this role.
• I spent much of the back-third of the movie imagining a different, better movie that could have been made out of the subplot of Ella's idiot brother's girlfriend (who is played by Ayo Edebiri). Imagine you go on many dates with a weirdo who is rich. He asks you to be his girlfriend. You defer the question. Then he changes his phone number and ghosts you for a full year!!! Then his annoying-as-hell sister becomes the damn governor and suddenly he's back on your doorstep asking if you want to be his girlfriend again! Maybe if the movie were from Ayo's perspective, we would understand why the character says "yes" to an exclusive relationship after all this time.
• There are only two policies that Ella cares about as a politician: the Moms Bill and something called Tooth Tutors, which is for rural children who need oral hygiene support. You might think the Moms Bill would cover parental leave. It does not. It covers preschool. Both of these politics are presented as if they are absurd, because Ella is so kooky and silly. 
• Ella McCay’s husband gives her an ultimatum: Make him co-governor, or he doesn’t want to be married to her anymore. Co-governor! A classic thing for a first husband to be!
• In one scene, Ella and her aunt scream to try to feel better. This scene was supposed to be funny, but was actually a little unsettling. The screams were too visceral. I began to wonder if I needed to scream! Would screaming release my stress caused by watching Ella McCay?
• Ella is forced to resign as governor, an office she occupied for three days. This is because her idiot husband went to the press and said that Ella bribed a reporter to keep him from running the story about her banging her husband—something the idiot husband in fact did. The moral of Ella McCay is that men are bad and they will ruin your life and you can only trust your aunt.
• Ella’s husband is arrested, and his pizza empire is stamped with health code violation signs. Did you know that watering down pizza sauce is a crime worthy of both arrest and closure of your restaurant? I sure didn't. Things were really different in 2008!
• Ella is governor for three whole days, during which she is sworn in, has two press scandals, gets secretly high, and attends one (1) meeting. Classic women at work! Always too busy dealing with interpersonal issues to be governor! Luckily, she's able to leverage her party's desire for her to resign into getting both Tooth Tutors and the Moms Bill passed. Incredible! The voice-over tells us that she was a triumph, which I guess is more than we can say for the movie.
• Ella never, ever struggles to put on her shoe while precariously balancing with one hand in the air. I have no idea where the image on the poster comes from or why it exists. 

Weird movie! I guess Ella McCay is about Ella McCay's three days as governor, though I didn’t learn that until the last five minutes of the movie. I’m sure I’ll have forgotten all of this in the next 45 minutes.