My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 27): Election Special #1
Election (1999)
Directed by Alexander Payne
Starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick
Leading up to the presidential election, I will focus on several election-oriented films of different styles. The first, Election, is a comedy I admired when it came out, but enjoyed even more now, as it seemed to foresee things like millenial-generation overachievement, the Bush-Gore hanging chad controversy, and even our own president’s campaign style. The director Alexander Payne (b. 1961) is known for his dark humor in films like Sideways (2004), and this one is certainly in that genre.
Equally good is Matthew Broderick as her teacher, the kind who loves being loved by the students, and is the advisor to every club. But he finds Tracy (appropriately) creepy and scary. During the film, his life falls to pieces after he has an affair with a family friend, and he acts out his frustrations by enacting ballot-counting voter fraud to deny Tracy the election win that she so certainly believes that she deserves. Bush-Gore came one year later. We do not feel too bad for Tracy, since she engages in her own dirty tricks, tearing down other candidates’ posters and allowing Tammy to be kicked out of school when she is assigned the blame. Of course Tammy got exactly what she wanted, since she gets to go to Catholic girls’ school and meet a new special friend, a stunner in a plaid dress. The plot is fun, rapid-moving, and unrelentingly cynical, just my kind of film.
Directed by Alexander Payne
Starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick
Leading up to the presidential election, I will focus on several election-oriented films of different styles. The first, Election, is a comedy I admired when it came out, but enjoyed even more now, as it seemed to foresee things like millenial-generation overachievement, the Bush-Gore hanging chad controversy, and even our own president’s campaign style. The director Alexander Payne (b. 1961) is known for his dark humor in films like Sideways (2004), and this one is certainly in that genre.
This film stars the 23-year-old Reese Witherspoon near the start of her career, when she was just getting bigger roles. This one led to numerous awards. She plays Tracy Flick, an intense high school student determined to bulldoze her way to success, starting with winning the high school student council president election. Her opponents are a football hero Paul (Chris Klein) known for his terminal niceness and large penis, and Paul’s sister Tammy, who mostly wants to get kicked out of school so she can instead attend a Catholic girls school where she envisions fulfilling her lesbian inclinations. In the background is Tracy’s mother, a constant critic of her daughter who seems to be using her to fulfill her own frustrated career failures. It is wonderful that in 1999, when the millennials were still children, that director Payne so clearly saw all the trends about helicopter parenting and career-obsessed students that are now so familiar in popular literature. Witherspoon is fantastic. She summons a range of emotions from satanic to angelic, and her manipulation of adults knows no bounds. This includes an affair with a high school teacher which leads to his firing (and subsequent employment as a Costco stocking clerk). Her third person voice-over narration runs through the film, and the writing conveys a terrific mix of cynical careerism, sociopathy, and vulnerability.
Equally good is Matthew Broderick as her teacher, the kind who loves being loved by the students, and is the advisor to every club. But he finds Tracy (appropriately) creepy and scary. During the film, his life falls to pieces after he has an affair with a family friend, and he acts out his frustrations by enacting ballot-counting voter fraud to deny Tracy the election win that she so certainly believes that she deserves. Bush-Gore came one year later. We do not feel too bad for Tracy, since she engages in her own dirty tricks, tearing down other candidates’ posters and allowing Tammy to be kicked out of school when she is assigned the blame. Of course Tammy got exactly what she wanted, since she gets to go to Catholic girls’ school and meet a new special friend, a stunner in a plaid dress. The plot is fun, rapid-moving, and unrelentingly cynical, just my kind of film.
Does Tracy get her way in the end? Sure, but we wonder if what she achieves is worth the trouble—as she gets into a Washington DC stretch limo in the company of a leering geriatric senator. In retrospect, this was a visionary film that predicted the coming 2000’s brilliantly. If you liked it then, take a look again.
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