ELECTION is a crafty little high school satire that deals with the is it O.K. to kill Hitler when he’s young question. The potential political menace here is female go getter Tracy Flick (a delicious performance by Reese Witherspoon), an ambitious, sweetly ruthless good at everything girl. She is poised to run unopposed and take the student body president step on her ladder to CEO of the world.
In this witty, word savoring adaptation of the 1998 Tom Perrotta novel by young Omaha based writer director Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth), the violence is only figurative. The flawed hero who gets involved to derail Tracy in their fictional Omaha high school is popular political science teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick).
He recruits a nonacademic but good hearted football star to run against her. This acidic spoof of widespread adult hypocrisy and cluelessness shows people as human, rather than cartoon characters. And everybody gets pretty much what they deserve.
Tracy, of course, is not Hitler just a bright manipulative girl driven by a Machiavellian mother (“You can’t let anything stand in your way”). Power is not the means but the end, something she deserves. Witherspoon makes Tracy formidable but also comically pathetic such as when she’s hopping in boundless joy down an empty corridor when she thinks she’s won. An expert at public relations, she’s always too self centered to understand why she’s destined to be unloved.
Mac has a moral clarity about Tracy and many other things (class discussions about morals and ethics) but not about himself. His childless marriage is emotionally sterile as well, and he ludicrously misinterprets the momentary affections of a divorced faculty wife. (With hilarity and poignancy, Broderick captures the true dark comedy of a man in mistaken romantic passion.)
Like Rushmore, Election is high school from a decidedly sardonic adult perspective, and sexuality is part of its satirical domain. The occasional erotic involvements are clumsy and unseductive. The football star also has a younger sister who thinks she’s gay. Out of spite, she also gets into the presidential race.
In the end, Election is smart, but probably a touch too much for its own good. Above average ironic morality play, with some affection for the sinners if not the sins satisfactory for mature viewers.
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