Shaun de Waal Movie of the week
If you haven’t yet tired of movies populated by American teenagers of varying degrees of sophistication, you will find writer- director Alexander Payne’s Election a superbly sardonic entertainment. It is a satire about democracy. How odd that sounds: who would want to satirise democracy? But democracy does not equal utopia; it is as open to abuse as any other earthly system, as likely to fall victim to human folly.
Matthew Broderick plays a dedicated and inspiring teacher, Jim McAllister. (We’re lucky he’s not playing a pupil – he seems to age at half the usual rate. Here, he even needs some grey streaked into the hair at the temples to signify his advancing adulthood.) McAllister is clearly a decent chap, though he is not without weaknesses: he detests Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), a little blonde go-getter burning with ambition and self-regard. She’s standing for the position of head of the student council, with all the trimmings of posters and slogans (“Pick Flick”), but she’s standing unopposed.
Until, that is, McAllister decides it would be better for the, ahem, democratic process if she were to have some opposition. So he persuades naive, empty- headed jock Paul Metzler (Chris Klein, also to be seen in American Pie) to stand against her. Soon, for reasons of her own, Paul’s anarchic sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) has joined them at the hustings, threatening to queer the pitch, so to speak, altogether.
Meanwhile, McAllister is having problems at home, toying with adultery even as he strives to impregnate his wife. Broderick provides an excellent portrait of bad faith: his attempt to balance the race for student leader is the first of the distortions he introduces into the electoral process (one meddler, one ballot?). His animus against Tracy skews his sense of propriety, making a mockery of the civic values he is trying to inculcate in his pupils.
Yet his animus is understandable. Apart from the ruin Tracy has earlier brought on a colleague of his, she is generally rather insufferable. Witherspoon plays her perfectly – perky to a fault, so adult in her manipulative ambition and yet so brattishly childlike in her emotional reactions. Tracy’s looks, too, make an exact contribution to the characterisation: her blonde hair is coiffed in an echo of the glamorous femmes fatales of film noir, but her grey-stockinged legs with a hint of knock-knees remind us she’s only a girl. Tracy is a sufficiently complex character for us to begin to feel sorry for her, despite our aversion, when the tide seems to be turning against her.
An equally nuanced characterisation is that of Campbell’s Tammy, the jock’s spoiler sister. Like the others, she is driven by personal compulsions that override the forms of civic duty. And here’s the serious nub of this delightfully funny film: Election explores the way the personal can seldom be separated from the political, especially when politics is so irradiated, as it is today, by the power of personality. After all, we’re only human.