Ella McCay

More Than Meets the Eye: James L. Brooks, Ella McCay, and the Binaries We Live Inside

What happens when a filmmaker refuses to let women be simple?

I want to start with something that has been sitting with me for a long time, a sentence by Hélène Cixous that I keep returning to whenever I watch a film and feel like something isn't quite adding up. Cixous argued that both men's and women's sexuality have been defined and trapped by binary oppositions, active versus passive, masculine versus feminine, and that heterosexual relationships have been built on a sense of otherness, even fear, created by these rigid absolutes. She wasn't just talking about desire in the abstract. She was talking about the architecture of how we understand each other. The invisible walls we build between ourselves and then call "natural."

That idea sat quietly in the back of my mind the first time I watched James L. Brooks' Ella McCay. And then it didn't sit quietly anymore.

"Men's sexuality, like women's, has been defined and circumscribed by binary oppositions... heterosexual relations have been structured by a sense of otherness and fear created by these absolute binaries."

Hélène Cixous

Critics have largely called the film crowded. Plotless, almost. Too many characters, too many threads that never quite resolve into a tidy story. And I get it, on the surface, it doesn't look like a traditional narrative. But that's exactly the point. What Brooks is doing, quietly and deliberately, is refusing the binary. He's putting real people on screen, messy, caring, contradictory people, and daring you to sit with the discomfort of that.

The family that isn't

Ella McCay grows up being raised by her aunt. Not a tragic orphan story, not a Cinderella situation, just a girl shaped by a woman who wasn't her mother but showed up like one anyway. That matters. From the jump, Brooks is already dismantling the idea that family has to look one particular way to be real.

Her parents, Eddie (Woody Harrelson) and Claire (Rebecca Hall), are introduced to us like a familiar cautionary tale: Eddie is having affairs, Claire absorbs it. The nuclear family as performance. And Brooks makes no bones about the fact that this arrangement is a fiction.  Eddie doesn't want to honor the family, and the film doesn't try to redeem him with some late-act awakening. What the film is actually doing is showing us Ella watching this, trying to understand it, and making a different choice. She moves toward her Aunt Helen, Eddie's sister, the one who actually shows up. A woman who didn't birth her but becomes her real parent. Brooks is quietly telling us: motherhood isn't biology. Care isn't contract. These binaries we've built around family, legitimate versus illegitimate, real versus chosen, are constructs. And they cost us.

The scandal that isn't a scandal

Here's where I think the film gets genuinely brave, and where I notice people getting a little uncomfortable, myself included, the first time.

In Ella's adult life, we encounter what looks, at first glance, like a standard political scandal. She's a congresswoman. There's a small apartment on the congressional floors. Ella invites her husband over when she's working late. A reporter finds out, threatens to frame it as an escort situation. The film lets you sit in that framing for a moment, lets you hear it the way the world would hear it, before peeling it back. Because the actual scandal, as it unravels, turns out to be Ryan Newell's: her husband, quietly leveraging the situation for his own political ambitions. The classic white male trope, Brooks acknowledges, but it lands differently here because we've been watching Ella the whole time. We know her competence, her care, her choices. We've been given the full picture. And so when her reputation is made the weapon, we feel the violence of it in a specific way.

What strikes me most is how Brooks structures the vulnerability. We're not watching a woman fall apart. We're watching a woman whose carefully constructed life, built on genuine competence and love, get weaponized against her precisely because she built it in public. The same confidence that made her effective becomes the thing that makes her a target. That's not just a political story. That's a gendered one. And it's one I think a lot of women will recognize somewhere in their bones.

What the binaries are hiding

Gender, as scholars have pointed out for decades, is a cultural universal, every society marks gender distinctions, but not in the same way. The question feminists have been asking since at least the Middle Ages is whether gender is something we're born into or something we're taught. Whether anatomy is fate or just one feature of a much more complicated life. Brooks doesn't answer that question directly, that would be too neat for a film this deliberately messy. What he does instead is populate the screen with people who refuse easy categories.

Ella is strong and independent and also in love and alsocompromised and also fighting back. She's not a symbol. She's not a lesson. She's a person. And that, honestly, is more radical than any manifesto. Because we've spent so long watching films where women are one thing, strong or broken, maternal or ambitious, innocent or complicit, that watching a woman be all of those things at once, in the same story, feels genuinely disorienting. That disorientation is doing work. It's showing you the shape of the binary you'd been breathing like air.

Brooks is asking us to do something hard: to look at a woman's full life, the family she chose, the career she built, the scandal she didn't create but still has to survive, and to resist the urge to flatten it. To resist the urge to decide, early and comfortably, what kind of woman she is. Because the moment we do that, we've already lost her. And losing her means losing the truth the film is trying to tell.

I left the film thinking about Cixous again. About how much of our fear of complexity in women, on screen, in politics, in our own lives, is really about protecting the binary. Because if the binary holds, the world makes sense in the way we were taught to expect it to. Active versus passive. Good wife versus bad. Victim versus villain. And if a film like Ella McCay gets called "plotless" for refusing those categories well. Maybe that tells us something too.

The same confidence that made her effective becomes the thing that makes her a target. That's not just a political story. That's a gendered one.

What Brooks has done, quietly, under the radar of critics looking for a traditional through-line, is create a film that lives inside the contradiction. That says: yes, people can be messy and caring at the same time. Yes, a woman can be a congresswoman and a wife and a daughter of a broken home and still be the most whole person in the room. Yes, a mother figure can be an aunt who chose you. None of these things cancel each other out. And the fact that we're still surprised by that, still inclined to call it "crowded" when a woman's life isn't reducible to one clean story, that's the binary talking. That's the fear Cixous named, still doing its work.

Ella McCay isn't asking you to resolve the tension. It's asking you to sit with it long enough to realize the tension was always there. You just weren't looking.