The result is a lot headier than Beavis and Butt-head Do America, Dead Man on Campus or 200 Cigarettes--some previous titles in the teen-oriented MTV library. In fact, the fresh charge of satire and the surreal spin director Payne lays on Perrotta's gem of a book represent improvements: It's a comedy with smarts that might appeal equally to adolescents and their parents.
It seems like only yesterday that Matthew Broderick was cutting class in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He gets the grownup part here--or what passes for the grownup part. He is one Jim McAllister, a history and current-events teacher at a suburban Omaha high school who takes his work, his moral authority and himself pretty seriously. He's an idealist who says he believes in the greater good, so he has no qualms about sabotaging a student-council election. The sole candidate for president, after all, is an insufferable teen striver named Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), who just happens to be the same ruthless vixen who ruined the career of McAllister's best friend, a horny geometry teacher named Dave Novotny. At McAllister's urging, a popular but none too bright football player, Paul Metzler (newcomer Chris Klein), suddenly enters the race, and the comic bloodletting begins.
If Perrotta's book and Payne's movie went only this far, they would have something to say about the traumas of high school life and the uses of petty power. On screen, we would still have the twin pleasures of Broderick's dead-on performance as a self-righteous semi-dork wearing K-Mart chinos and spouting off about the distinction between ethics and morality, as well as Witherspoon's brilliant turn as a snippy careerist whose ambition seems to be ambition itself. But Payne is happy to push the envelope, just as he did in Citizen Ruth, his satire about a low-rent slattern caught up in the abortion debate. With startling ease, Election graduates from the prom-night obsessions of most teen flicks to a wry examination of hypocrisy and desire at any age.
Before you know it, you've visited the basement where Jim McAllister hides his collection of pornographic videos. You've learned that Paul Metzler's younger sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) yearns desperately for a classmate named Lisa Flanagan (Frankie Ingrassia). You see that single-minded Tracy Flick, every blond hair in place, is driven by a backstage mother. You find that long-married Jim McAllister, Professor Eat-Your-Peas in public, is not above putting the moves on his fallen best friend's toothy ex-wife, Linda (Delaney Driscoll). You learn that the school principal (Phil Reeves) is a birdbrain.
Perrotta's novel, which was set in suburban New Jersey, travels easily to middle-American Omaha, Payne's hometown. Obviously comfortable in his surroundings (he also shot Citizen Ruth there), the director leavens his satire with sympathy. The beautifully drawn characters we encounter here are not mere objects of scorn but human beings with blood running through their veins. They don't represent poses; they illuminate ambiguity. For every belly laugh we get as the foolish McAllister scurries to organize a tryst with Linda Novotny at a local motel, we get an equally powerful jolt of pathos from the sheer desperation of his act. We laugh out loud at the goofy campaign speeches of the kids running for office--three of them now, including Paul's resentful sister, Tammy--but we also feel the sting of adolescence gone awry.
There's more than meets the eye and ear in Election--a full-grown microcosm, in fact. Perrotta, a Yale grad who teaches creative writing at Harvard, says he was spurred to write his satire by two events: the 1992 presidential campaigns, in which Ross Perot became the surreal wild card, and the case of a Southern high school principal who secretly invalidated a prom-queen election because the winner was pregnant. As an epigraph for his novel, Perrotta quoted William Trevor: "The world is the school gone mad."
For McAllister and Paul, Tracy and Tammy, school must seem like the world gone mad. Happily, this irreverent, sharply observant comedy sweeps us into the maelstrom, too.
--Gallo
Election.
Directed by Alexander Payne. Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, from a novel by Tom Perrotta. Starring Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein and Jessica Campbell.
