OVP: Election (1999)

Film: Election  (1999)
Stars: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein, Jessica Campbell
Director: Alexander Payne
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

When I do reviews on the blog, by-and-large they are for films that I have already seen.  However, I decided recently when I was re-watching films that I haven't weighed in on the blog, and in particular when those films are part of the OVP, that I should probably start sharing a more comprehensive overlook of my thoughts on the film, since we'll either be discussing it in the future, or I never gave my overall picture of the film when we did our OVP write-ups.  This is to say that there's nothing really snap about that judgment ranking up there-I've seen Election multiple times through the year, and caught it again last night on cable.  However, since it's never been reviewed on the site, and since it was nominated for an Oscar, I figured I'd do a quick dive into the movie once more.

(Spoilers Ahead) Alexander Payne has not been particularly celebrated around these parts, but that wasn't always the case for me.  In fact, once-upon-a-time, I actually quite enjoyed his work.  Movies like The Descendants and Nebraska haven't been as sharp or as insightful as his earlier work, and while I still have a major miss left in his filmography (I've never seen Citizen Ruth), what easily keeps me hoping every time I go to one of his pictures is the sharp and biting humor of Election, by far his finest film.

Election is the tale of a student body election in snow-covered Omaha, where an affable-but-kind-of-a-loser teacher Jim McAllister (Broderick) is the faculty advisor to the student government.  He has found something of a nemesis in a perky-but-abrasive senior named Tracy Flick (Witherspoon) who seems intent to win the presidency of the student body.  Flick creates so much ire to Mr. McAllister that he convinces dumb but lovable Paul Metzler (Klein) to get into the race, thereby creating an all-out-war against Flick, who is determined to win at pretty much every cost.  Things get complicated when Paul's younger sister Tammy (Campbell) starts a rebel third-party candidacy in retaliation for Paul inadvertently stealing away Tammy's secret girlfriend.

The film could so easily have devolved into a serious of caricatures of naive and simple-minded Midwesterners (like, say, Nebraska), but that's not the direction that Payne takes it.  Perhaps because he has a source material to rely upon for story structure (something several later films didn't have), he is able to keep the story pretty well-rounded.  You end up seeing all four characters' angles, and you also get to see as a result a pretty even-keeled story.  I think Payne's vision of the film is to hate Tracy and perhaps sympathize with McAllister, but he leaves it open enough to make you realize that pretty much everyone here can be both the villain and the hero.  Even someone as seemingly innocent as Paul is a bit of a conundrum; he's incredibly sweet and nice, but he's a terrible candidate when compared to Tracy, and he's really only able to compete with her because he's hot and a football player.

The dialogue in the film (its sole Oscar nomination) is some of the sharpest of the 1990's.  You have so many quotable lines, and the script really lends itself to building on to the story.  The four main characters and their internal monologues aren't just funny, but they build into the delusions that they carry about themselves.  We see that, say, Tammy doesn't think she's a lesbian, even though she's only ever been attracted to girls or that Paul is supposedly so sweet but is really only interested in Lisa because she was willing to have sex with him.  Narration in films is always an extremely tricky thing, because it makes the rest of the script lazy or repetitive if it's too expositional, but Payne's script adds by giving us things that the dialogue isn't quite taking us toward.

The other nomination that the film should have landed was a lead citation for Witherspoon.  While I admittedly have to see both a few nominees from that year (Swank, McTeer) and a few just-misses (Weaver, Winslet, Stone), I still feel pretty confident in asserting that Witherspoon would make my personal Top 5.  Her work in this film is easily the best so-far of her career.  She manages to find that fine line between making Tracy a villain or a "rhymes with witch" (it would be so easy to do both) and instead makes her extremely driven, tormented-by-imperfection, and someone that will either end up in an insane asylum or Congress (insert joke here about them being one-in-the-same).  One of the genius moves of the film is to not let Tracy get her comeuppance about tearing down the posters, and instead end up pretty much exactly where she expected, with Mr. McAllister ending up the complete loser chucking milkshakes at limousines.  Sometimes in life that happens, and I love that Payne was able to deliver the bitter without shoving down the sweet like he had to, in, say, Nebraska (man I did not like that movie).

Those are my thoughts on this film that is shockingly fifteen years old (can you believe it?!?).  What are yours?  Do you still long for the days when Alexander Payne made films this sharp?  Do you think that Election would still be able to muster an Oscar nomination these days?  And who gets your vote-Paul or Tracy (or a write-in for disqualified Tammy)?  Share in the comments!