His first movie in 15 years, James L. Brooks’s Ella McCay is a political comedy/drama about a woman unexpectedly thrust into the limelight when she becomes a state governor. Brooks is 85 now and many had assumed his filmmaking days were behind him – and this film has been met with such an underwhelming response, it wouldn’t be a surprise if they are now, which is a shame.
It is the fifth consecutive film he has directed featuring a score by Hans Zimmer, their collaboration going back to 1994’s I’ll Do Anything (and the composer has also scored several projects produced by Brooks) – in keeping with their previous collaborations, the music is a departure from the big sound usually associated with Zimmer, being a purely orchestral work taking a traditional approach to this sort of material.
The best of Zimmer’s scores for Brooks – As Good as it Gets and Spanglish – both feature terrific, catchy main themes which serve as anchors for the rest of it. While there is a bouncy melody at the heart of Ella McCay which is heard throughout the score, and it’s very pleasant indeed, it doesn’t quite have that same sticky quality and I find it disappears from my head as soon as the album’s over.
My favourite moments come in the score’s subtlest moments – the heartfelt piano and flute of “Taking a Moment”, for example; when it is more overtly comedic in nature, as it is for long periods, it comes off like a distant cousin of Marc Shaiman and Alan Silvestri comedy scores of the 1990s, remaining pleasant and inoffensive but I find the sequences rather run into one and Zimmer doesn’t quite find the same level of charm.
It’s a cheerful, tuneful piece of work which – at a shade under 40 minutes – doesn’t outstay its welcome on the album. It’s quite ironic that it is such a curio in terms of Zimmer’s style, certainly in more recent times, and that it hearkens back to the sort of music which used to be heard so often in films a few decades back and whose demise can largely be attributed to Zimmer’s own rise and dominance over the whole art form. It is hard to imagine this one attracting too much attention, despite its inherent warmth which certainly has strong appeal, but at the very least I can imagine people sticking the very nice concluding track “Hope Comes Close” onto some playlists.
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