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Reese Witherspoon runs for office in high-school satire Election |
Director: Alexander Payne
Cast: Matthew Broderick (Jim McAllister), Reese Witherspoon
(Tracy Flick), Chris Klein (Paul Metzler), Jessica Campbell (Tammy Metzler),
Phil Reeves (Principal Walt Hendricks), Molly Hagen (Diane McAllister), Colleen
Camp (Judith Flick), Delaney Driscoll (Linda Novotny), Mark Harelik (Dave Novotny)
High school can be a great setting for films that want to
comment on our adult world, because they are such exact microcosms for society.
Few films get this idea as effectively as Alexander Payne’s simply superb Election.
In an Illinois high school, Jim McAllister (Matthew
Broderick) is a civics teacher who loves his job but is increasingly annoyed by
high-achieving student Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), who he also unconsciously
blames for the dismissal of his friend Dave for having an affair with her.
Tracy is a ruthless careerist, the sort of girl whose hand is always first up
in class, and she wants more than anything to win the election to school
president. Feeling it his duty to stop Tracy, McAllister persuades football
star Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run against her – and slowly unleashes a
hurricane of ruthless campaigning and dirty tricks that leads to disaster.
This sharp and brilliant satirical comedy avoids jumping to
any easy conclusions: instead it ruthlessly skewers everyone involved. Other
films would make McAllister a crushed victim, broken down by events and Tracy’s
unstoppable force of will. Instead, Payne turns him into an increasingly self-deluding
whiner whose impending mid-life crisis becomes more and more evident. There is
a particularly sly decision to cast Broderick as this weak-willed, selfish, self-proclaimed
victim. Who cannot think about Ferris Bueller now all grown up into a klutzy
loser, ineptly trying to initiate an affair with his wife’s best friend and mentally
super-imposing Tracy’s head onto his wife’s body during a routine
pregnancy-focused coupling?
In fact, watching the film it’s fascinating to see how much
it charts McAllister’s disintegration into bitterness and self-justification.
By any measureable standard, everything he does is fairly indefensible, while
his annoyance with Tracy is rooted in his barely self-acknowledged sexual
fascination with her. By the end of the film, as his cheery voiceover recounts
his failures and personal and professional disasters with a self-deceiving optimism,
you can’t help but begin to wonder how much this manic cheerfulness infected
everything McAllister has told us from the start.
It’s things like this that make the film so much more than a
straight political satire. Tracy Flick may be a ruthlessly ambitious young
woman, who believes she has a nearly divine right to win – but she’s also the
child of an equally ruthless woman (using Tracy to relive her own life), who
has been sexually exploited by one of her teachers, whose smiles and enforced cheerfulness
and drive hide a volcanic anger and insecurity. She could have been simply a
smiling force of political ambition – but instead she feels like a real person
diverting her own problems into a domineering careerism.
All of which adds a rich hinterland to the film and helps
make it even funnier than it could have been. This might be the best political
satire ever made. It’s certainly one of the funniest. There are zinger lines every
few minutes. The satire is pin-sharp. Tracy is the qualified political hack
that the normal people can’t relate to. Paul the Bush-like jock who can speak
the language of the common man but manifestly lacks all qualifications. Tammy
represents the anarchic frustration and alienation so many feel for the
political process. The entire election is a shrewd, subtle skewering of every campaign
in politics you’ve ever seen. Even the jobsworth geeks who run these things get
it in the neck – “Larry, we’re not electing the fucking Pope” McAllister snaps (at
the end of his tether) as he has the ludicrously elaborate election rules
explained to him again.
But the film doesn’t forget the humanity: McAllister is a
deluded man, but he feels real. He’s so inept at everything from seduction to
deception it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him. (As if to visualise his
uselessness, he spends the last third of the film mostly with a massive swollen
eye from a bee sting). Tracy has her own problems. Paul, far from being a
heartless jock, is the most sensitive and caring person in the film (even if he
is as dim as a failing lightbulb). Tammy’s a touching combination of good
natured cynicism and obsessive, vengeful stalker.
Of course, it also helps that the acting is outstanding, the
comic timing (both in acting and direction) perfect. Reese Witherspoon might
never have been better than as the ruthless Tracy, a hurricane of hilarious repeated
concepts from political biographies. Chris Klein is very sweet as Paul, a guy
it’s impossible not to like. Jessica Campbell is perfect. Broderick holds the
entire film together with a superb schleppy moral weakness. Payne’s direction
brings all these elements together brilliantly – and has a way with the freeze
frame and quick edit that provides a series of striking visual gags.
Election is a
classic film – a brilliant satire on politics and elections, but also human
nature itself. The characters have depth and reality that makes the jokes hit
home with force. The use of voiceover narration from all the main players helps
bring us even closer to them, and helps expose their inner personalities even
more. I think this might be the best film Payne has made – Sideways and The Descendants
receive the greater plaudits and attention, but this is his sharpest, wittiest
film, and the one that is perhaps the most rewarding of repeat viewing. It’s
simply a brilliant, small scale classic.
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