Director: Alexander Payne
Starring: Matthew Broderick,Reese Witherspoon,Chris Klein
The film Election was based on a novel that satirized the 1992
Presidential Campaign. There’s a hyper-efficient brown-noser (Clinton-esque
before we knew about Monica), there’s the clueless dude who figure’s he’ll
win because he’s a football star and it’s, like, his destiny (hello Bush),
and his totally random sister who wants to win just to overthrow the system (à
la Perot). But wait a minute, recent events suggest this is a Nostradamus-like
prediction of the 2000 Election.
The brown-nosing Tracy FLICK (it looks better in caps), played unerringly by
Reese Witherspoon, is Gore. The clueless dude is much more like W. than Pa Bush.
And his sister makes a better Nader than Perot. Why is this important? Because
there’s also some great characters in the teachers, especially Matthew
Broderick, who has a hand in the election counting. Could he be Katherine
Harris, the Floridian Secretary of State and member of the Bush Campaign? It’s
nearly perfect, and now I know who will become President next January. Rent this
movie, and you will, too.
It’s Reese. In the middle of watching this movie, my roommate and I looked
at each other and swore to see every movie this girl is ever in. She’s
terrific. Somehow she’s horrible, fascinating, sexy, disgusting, evil, a
victim, the aggressor, and the hero (or one of them), all at once.
And Alexander Payne, the director, helps her in such bizarre ways. The moment
I decided I loved this movie is when he freezes on a frame of Tracy in class.
Usually, freeze frames show someone in a dynamic gesture, so when the film
starts up again, they continue their leap over the bushes and it looks cool.
This frame is one of those that you never really see: her mouth is half open,
her eyes are half closed. The only way I can describe Reese at this moment is
“fugly”. And I think she’s a lovely actress most of the time. The fact
that Payne chose this frame (and Reese allowed it) says a lot about the level of
satire in this movie. And it’s thick.
This movie mocks movies, high school, high school movies, high school movies
starring Matthew Broderick, politicians, politics and anything else that fits in
its frame. This is not a teen movie, and I think it suffered at the box office
because people thought it was. This is a sophisticated adult movie that works on
a lot of levels, and doesn’t get away with too many cheap laughs (a few).
Instead of emphasizing how dumb someone is, the film emphasizes their
essentially generous nature. Instead of making a teenage Machiavelli out of
Tracy, the movie helps us understand the psychology behind her ambition.
If the 2000 Election coverage were as fair as the movie “Election”, we
might all have cast the same votes, but maybe more of them would have been for
someone and less against someone else.
