By Alexander Payne, 1999.
Starring Matthew Broderick, Jessica Campbell, Chris Klein, Reese Witherspoon.
Rating: 10/10, 10/10.
In my review of Being John Malkovich, I said that it was one of those rare movies that are so good that, soon after seeing them, it is impossible to believe that they really were that good. My memories of this movie, one thinks, must be inaccurate; it must have just been a pretty good movie, not one of the best of all time.
Well, 1999 must have been a great year for movies, because Being John Malkovich wasn’t the only movie that good that year. There was also Election.
I saw Election when it came out, and it completed the process that Being John Malkovich had started. Those two movies did for my movie viewing what Belle & Sebastian had done for my music listening two years earlier: they opened it up to a whole new world. Before I’d been content to listen to whatever was on the Clear Channel stations and watch whatever opened on several screens at the multiplex, but after I would never be able to again. And one other important thing changed, too. Before I heard Belle & Sebastian, music was a background thing, something I enjoyed but didn’t particularly care about. After, it was my life. Before I saw Being John Malkovich and Election, movies were just entertainment, fun while they happened but not every important. After, they were my life.
But of course, once we move four years into the future, to my 21 year old self in 2003, I’m beginning to doubt my memories. Just like with Being John Malkovich, I think it couldn’t possibly have been that good, that it must have just been my naivete and ignorance. Surely all of the great movies I’d seen in the intervening four years made Election seem simply like a run of the mill good movie. So I rented it and saw it again, and, again like Being John Malkovich, I was wrong. If anything, Election was better than I remembered.
It’s one of those movies that skirts the lines between realism and stylization, between straight narrative and allegory, and between The Bicycle Thief and Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill!. It follows (mostly) the relationship between Jim McAllister (Broderick), an unremarkable high school teacher, and the wonderfully named Tracy Enid Flick (Witherspoon), a bright, intelligent, ambitious, friendly, and likeable student who is an utterly detestible monster, as Tracy runs for class president and Jim realizes that he must, at all costs, stop her. He convinces Paul Metzler (Klein), the popular football star who also has the sympathy vote because his leg is broken and he can never play football again, to run against her. And when Tammy (Campbell), his sister (who is not a lesbian—she’s "attracted to the person. It’s just that every person I’ve ever been attracted to happens to be a girl") gets dumped by her girlfriend, who decides she’s straight and starts dating Paul out of spite, she decides to run, too, to get back at Paul.
Tammy and Paul are wonderful characters, played beautifully by Klein and Campbell, but the real focus of the movie is Jim and Tracy. And Broderick and Witherspoon are excellent, as can be expected. I’ve never cared one way or the other for Broderick, I tend to just see him as solidly good, if you know what I mean, but here he puts in what should have been a career-revitalizing performance. And Witherspoon is quite simply the most talented actor of her generation, and one of the very best currently working, and in Election she is at her absolute best, even surpassing her work in Freeway.
This is one of those movies where, talking about it, I want to just say "and remember this part? And this part? And this part?" and essentially go through the entire movie like that. It’s one of those movies where, reviewing it, I eventually realize that what I really want to be doing isn’t writing a review of it, but seeing it again. Where rather than tell people about how great it is, I just want to show them.