DIRECTOR
Alexander
Payne
SCREENWRITERS
Alexander
Payne
Jim Taylor
based
on the novel by
Tom
Perrotta
PRODUCERS
Albert Berger
David Gale
Keith Samples
Ron Yerxa
CINEMATOGRAPHER
James Glennon
MUSIC
Rolfe Kent
EDITOR
Kevin Tent
CAST
Matthew Broderick (Jim McAllister)
Reese Witherspoon (Tracy Flick)
Chris Klein (Paul Metzler)
Molly Hagan (Diane McAllister)
Colleen Camp (Judith Flick)
Jessica Campbell (Tammy Metzler)
Matt Malloy (Vice-Principal Bell)
Holmes Osborne (Dick Metzler)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 103m
U.S. release: April 23, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Alexander
Payne movies
reviewed on this website:
- About
Schmidt
|
Teen
cinema is full of here-today, gone-five-minutes-from-now stars
-- today's Jennifer Love Hewitt is tomorrow's Dana Plato -- but
Reese Witherspoon is the real thing. She is the oddest young
actress: a perky lioness who can shift from a sunny grin to a
squinched-up pout of disgust in a millisecond. In movies like
Freeway,
Pleasantville, and the biting new satire Election,
Witherspoon sometimes seems like the only fully alive person
on the screen -- if only because she has so much more energy
than her costars -- and sometimes that energy lashes out and
zaps people. This lioness can be red in tooth and claw.
Election, the second feature by director Alexander Payne
and co-writer Jim Taylor (their previous collaboration was 1996's
Citizen Ruth), finds Witherspoon sharpening her fangs
on her hapless classmates and teachers at George Washington Carver
High in Omaha. She's Tracy Flick (the surname spelled in caps
on a poster sometimes comes prankishly close to obscenity), a
true renaissance girl who throws herself into every possible
extracurricular activity. Tracy knows that women must work twice
as hard for success, so she's starting early. In fact, when it
comes time to begin her candidacy for Student Council President,
she has her table set up, her sign-up pads neatly arranged, long
before the first bell of the school day. And God himself couldn't
help anyone who gets in her way.
Watching the brash, confident, resourceful Tracy, we might wonder
how she'd get along with a brash, confident, resourceful teen
of a decade ago -- Ferris Bueller. As it happens, we don't have
to wonder: Matthew Broderick, with some meat around the middle
and some gray in his temples, is Jim McAllister, a well-respected
history teacher at Carver High. Ferris was a different prodigy
than Tracy -- he was more of a goof-off, using his wits and energy
to get out of school. Jim could almost be Ferris ten years later,
settled into a stable job, an unsurprising life. The answer to
our question is, Ferris and Tracy wouldn't get along, and neither
do Tracy and Jim; Jim sees Tracy as a ruthless climber, and he
tosses a few roadblocks in her path, including a likable but
dim jock (Chris Klein) and the jock's nihilistic lesbian sister
(Jessica Campbell), both of whom run against Tracy.
It's said that the rest of life is high school, only more so;
Payne and Taylor invert the equation here, treating the power
plays and snubs and naked competition of high school as a microcosm
for American politics (with a little economics tossed in). The
script, based on a Tom Perrotta novel, is tight and elegant;
Payne's neutral eye, which he turned so effectively onto pro-choicers
and pro-lifers in Citizen Ruth, stares just as unblinkingly
at the fallible students and teachers brought low by their own
unattainable desires. Everyone, that is, except Tracy; for her,
no desire is unattainable, provided you get up early enough and
press enough flesh.
Tracy seems almost like an alien, but then so do Anthony Robbins
or Stephen Covey or your choice of personal-improvement gurus.
One can picture her ten years from now, tossing off a bestseller
explaining how to achieve your dreams, using the banal language
of optimism and self-realization to smother the cries of those
she's destroyed on the way up. The brilliance of Election,
and of Reese Witherspoon's performance, is that we also see the
human being inside all that manipulation and muck. When Tracy
thinks she's defeated, her despair is nearly Homeric; she bawls
like the little girl she never really got a chance to be, and
our hearts go out to her in spite of ourselves. But the movie
isn't over yet, and there are more twists in store. Alexander
Payne catches us feeling sorry for these characters -- Tracy
in her time of agony, the hapless Jim, the miserable lesbian
outcast, the aw-shucks jock -- and then turns the tables on us.
Nobody in Election is as bad as they seem; nobody is as
good as they seem, either. |