In times of
political malfeasance, when corruption and self-aggrandizement is the rule of
law, political satire can be a tonic or a depressant, but either way necessary.
And it seems to me Alexander Payne’s Election (available from
Criterion in a beautiful Blu-ray package), is a bracing intellectual tonic
pitched perfectly, even though it was made almost 20 years ago, for the era of
our current presidential, and perhaps our upcoming constitutional crisis. And though
she is front and center and the spark that ignites it, the movie’s tart
brilliance and no-holds-barred charge goes beyond Reese Witherspoon’s inspired
and fearless performance.
Election is, I think, a genuinely great
American movie, powered of course by the Little Engine That Could (And If She
Can’t, Then She Insists On Knowing Why Not), Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick, but
also by a so-far career-best efforts from co-writer-director Alexander Payne
(maddeningly inconsistent to date), with a profound assist from his editor,
Kevin Tent; and Matthew Broderick, of the delicious-beyond-measure deadpan
disbelief and eye-popped shock, as sincerely misguided, not to mention doomed,
high school history teacher Jim McAllister, whose meddling in a high school
election, and a possible affair with a friend’s wife, leads if not to tragedy
exactly, then certainly humiliation and an almost eerie confirmation that the
best-laid plans can often curdle into unexpected consequence. (Unless, of
course, you’re self-obsessed enough to see them through with little regard to
the humanity in your purview, in which case you’re likely to be the raw
material for making a future huge splash in Washington and world politics.)
Even
the less familiar faces in Election are inspired—Chris Klein’s aw-shucks
quarterback Paul, and Tracy’s main competition for student body presidential
glory, is sublimely, believably sweet (he’s the only marginally well-adjusted
person in the movie, and he’s probably a dunce); Jessica Campbell, an unknown
before and since 1999, nails the line between sullen disregard and blindly
romantic fixation as Paul’s sister Tammy, who rallies unexpected enthusiasm
from the hostile student body when she declares that her chief goal as the
third candidate for president will be to dismantle the structure of student
government (sound familiar?); Phil Reeves’ pitch-perfect smugness as the school
principal, who brandishes a degree in CYA; Mark Harelik as McAllister’s fellow
teacher, mewling through tears as he defends his predatory affair with Tracy as
true love; and even bit players like Nicholas D’Agostino (who would later
snatch the lead in Final Destination 5) as the student charged with
tallying the election results who uncovers McAllister’s ill-advised attempt to
deny Tracy her legitimately earned one-vote victory (earned through Klein’s
selfless casting of his vote for his opponent). D’Agostino's indignant reaction
to the questioning of his mathematical skills when the total votes cast don’t
gibe with the number of registered voters is a mini-master class in expressing
the pride which can’t help but swell in the face of resistance from adults who
aren’t living up to the responsibilities of their authority.
But
what ultimately scoots Election, as astute a political satire as has
ever been made in this country, to the head of the class is how it distributes
the judgment of its satirical eye. No one character is painted with such broad
strokes of sinister Machiavellian intent, or bumbling misunderstanding of
circumstances they themselves have created, or even relative virtue, that they
can be shrugged off and simply laughed at, nor is anyone necessarily let off
the hook either, the dangling made even more sublime by the ease with which we
can see ourselves up there, twisting in the breeze. Election is at play
in the real world, a movie of a certain harshness that isn’t itself blind to
the moments in which even the most strident and the most self-righteous of us
(traits shared, by the way, by both of the primary antagonists in the story)
can reveal themselves as aching, abused, recognizable, yet still accountable
humans.
And
for a movie that would seem to be absent the recognition of the divine, there
does seem to be a rather gleeful engagement with a sort of Old Testament
retribution, the sneaking sense of a cranky, petulant God who enjoys watching
his creations rail at each other and otherwise get up to a hearty degree of
self-destructive no-good. After all, in an era dominated by the petulant whims
of a would-be dictator and his congressional enablers, 60 million or so voters
intellectually blind enough to support them and their decisions through thick
and thicker, and the globally disastrous consequences of such willful
ignorance, when is the sting of a bee, suffered midway through the film directly
in the eye by Broderick’s clueless sufferer, a man who can’t or won’t see the
profound and continuing error of his ways, ever just a bee sting? Though it was
made in 1999, Election seems, with each unavoidable encroachment of the
news of the day, even more timely than ever, and recommended viewing, perhaps
more than once, between now and November 2020.
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