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I, like many other people born under the warm and benevolent gaze of president Ronald Reagan, was obsessed with Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide as a kid. It was thick as two bibles and seemed to contain within it all the secrets of the universe. My sister and I pored over it, mapping out weekends of video rentals and learning the career trajectories of various actors and directors who caught our interest. We treated Maltin’s capsule reviews as gospel, though eventually reached a point in our development where we felt comfortable disagreeing with him. Still, he shepherded us happily down the path of movie fandom, our bearded and slightly dorky Virgil. 

Maltin was particularly effusive about the movies of James L. Brooks. Well, at least about Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, two jewels of the 1980s. The former I’d heard of through cultural osmosis, but the latter was a surprise. There was a whole movie about people who worked on TV, and it starred the lady from Always, which I loved?? 

My dad was a professor at Boston College and back then they had a proper media library, a small sea of little carrels with TVs and VCRs in them where you could watch something selected from the school’s collection. So on some sick day (I’m sure I faked it) when my dad plopped me down there while he went to teach, I headed straight to Broadcast News, and then, on another day, to Terms of Endearment. I didn’t quite understand all the grownup nuances of those sharp and endlessly energetic movies, but I got the gist: this was a smart guy who cared about people a lot. And he had a cool factor, too—there was his production company logo closing out each episode of The Simpsons, the bedrock cultural touchstone of my life.

A few years later, my whole family went to see As Good As It Gets in the theater, some wonderful Saturday night in the winter during which I, at 14, felt elegant and smart and perhaps curiously connected to Greg Kinnear’s character. I was, I determined, a really big fan of James L. Brooks.

And so it was sad to see Spanglish my senior year of college, to watch Brooks trying to recapture something that then seemed beyond his grasp. There is something to be said for Téa Leoni’s breakneck turn as one of the worst people in the world, but otherwise Spanglish is a correctly forgotten relic. Then came How Do You Know, when I was fully a grownup and living in New York and writing for Gawker so I felt much cooler than the heroes I used to idolize, and it was only confirmation of what Spanglish suggested. Brooks had lost his fastball for good.

Fifteen years passed and I got older and softer and realized I was never cool and I started to crave a bit of that old Brooksian sparkle, some of the chatty, discursive, humane stuff that has long been lacking in Hollywood movies. My parents freaked out because they read that Brooks was planning on filming a new movie in Providence, where they now live, and they asked me a million questions about it. But I knew as little as anybody else. I told them that chances were it would never be made at all. 

But, it was made, in fact, and that movie is called Ella McCay and it is out in theaters this Friday. I went to a press screening with both apprehension and a silly dart of hope in my heart. Maybe How Do You Know was the rock bottom from which Brooks would now gloriously ascend. I knew that, probably, Ella McCay wouldn’t reach the heights of his ’80s work, but it could still at least be a welcome return to the character-driven cinema of my youth. 

I’m happy to report that Ella McCay is in no way worse than How Do You Know. At times it’s better than Spanglish. Brooks has toned down his Brooksisms—those curlicue word clusters that sound profound upon first hearing them but tend to fall apart under closer analysis—but he still gives his characters plenty of nicely rhythmed things to say. What hampers the film, really, is that these people don’t have enough room to say it all—it’s evident that a significant portion of the story was cut, either in production or during editing, and the movie seems to walk around those absences like they are chalk outlines on the floor. 

If there is a three-hour director’s cut somewhere out there, I’d like to see it. Perhaps in that version we will better know the interior life of the titular character, played with admirable effort by Emma Mackey, and those of her family, who all bustle around her in typically Brooksian huffs. A longer version might also smooth out the politics portion of the story, in which Ella is suddenly made governor of her state (it is just State; no specific name given, though it’s obvious we’re not in, say, New Mexico) and must navigate the mildest of sex scandals. 

That scandal involves Ella’s husband, who is played by Britishman Jack Lowden but who is supposed to be the heir to a pizza parlor in this state that is not Rhode Island but looks a whole lot like Rhode Island. Lowden doesn’t exactly scream New England pizza restaurant owner (nor does Becky Ann Baker, who plays his richly coiffed mother), but that’s an easy enough problem to get over. What really doesn’t work about the character, and thus about the entire plot line, is that it’s never quite credible that he’s the cad he turns out to be. There’s no buildup to the tension in the marriage; it is just suddenly there, unexplained. 

While Ella manages political potholes, there is also the matter of her father, played by Woody Harrelson, who has returned home on some sort of apology tour for some reason that is never elucidated. He could almost lift out of the movie entirely and nothing would be affected. The same goes for Ella’s brother, a brooding loner 20something played by Spike Fearn. He makes millions doing online sports betting, or something, and he’s desperately hung up on the girl who dumped him a year ago. She is played by Ayo Edebiri, in just one scene, and while the two have some weird chemistry, their arc has no real purpose in the film. Maybe it would in the uncut version. 

One wants to like this jumble of narratives—there is also a barely-there love arc involving Kumail Nanjiani’s state trooper character, Jamie Lee Curtis flits around as Ella’s wacky aunt, Albert Brooks plays the former governor—and to accept Brooks’s treatise about the need for smarts and sense in American politics. But it is hard to embrace something that keeps wriggling out of your grasp. Just when you think you’ve landed on what it is Brooks is trying to say, the movie goes bounding off in a new direction. 

The film is set in 2008, which I think is meant to situate Ella’s policy-heavy political optimism as part of the Obama groundswell. But none of that context is really grappled with in the film; one wonders if Brooks maybe just wanted to do a movie without smartphones. Or, maybe, he didn’t want to contend with Trumpism, so spoiled is wealthy liberals’ political outlook by all that unseemliness. 

There is nothing aggressively wrong with Ella McCay, as there certainly was in the white-guilt apologia Spanglish, but it is a movie that mistakes messiness for amiable shagginess. The ramble of the movie isn’t endearing the way it is in Brooks’s great works. It’s an unwieldy object that does, at its best, faintly evoke past glory—the glittering dialogue and complicated emotional mechanics of the Brooks heyday—but otherwise just made me wish I was back in the basement of O’Neill library on the BC campus, headphones on and discovering the lives of Aurora Greenway and Jane Craig and the myriad other James L. Brooks people who care about each other in all their vexing and wonderful idiosyncrasy. Would that it were that I could extend that same grace to poor Ella and the rest of the McCays.

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