Alexander Payne's breathlessly energetic and idea-rich satire broke his name after the still obscure indy Citizen Ruth. While his directorial efforts have remained toward the indy margins, his work is well enough regarded for movie-goers to get a ticket on the name alone. 1999 was a great year at the marginal mainstream cinema with the likes of Fight Club, The Blair Witch Project, Being John Malkovich and many more (which I be revisiting throughout this year) so Election, just as those titles do, has a lot of weight pulling to do if it is to linger in the memory.
One of the forward features of those titles and even mainstream fare like the Matrix was a quirky freshness that made it feel like the medium was getting a reboot. So, for Payne to take a new bestseller and bring it to the screen with this mix of faith to the source and divergence from it, meant that this was a cinematic workout. His hand at this, though, was so firm but light that it not only flies by but the number of concepts bombarding the viewer is both great and unburdensome.
First, he keeps the multi-narrator structure from the novel. We just don't get time to settle too comfortably as Jim's matter of fact voice gives way to Tracey's strident one, Paul's goofy optimism and Tammy's teenage anger as their voiceover accounts play over Simpsons/South Park like montages. The speed and energy of this prevent it ever getting too samey. When it's time to slow down it goes deep (e.g. Jim with a bee stung eye peering around the corner of a room in his house to see the worst thing his wrongdoing could have served up).
Matthew Broderick gives us a Jim trying to do good but struggling with a conscience that won't quite leave him alone. Reese Witherspoon, already a child and then indy actor, strikes gold with Tracey Flick, accentuating her skull like face with the piercing blues, die cut diction and spasmodic motion. Chris Klein brings the same daggy popular guy he'd add to the American Pie movies which is perfect here. Jessica Campbell shines as the awkward adolescent explosion of Tammy. Between these and a solid supporting cast there really isn't a false note heard.
Payne shot the novel's ending but chose his own instead. By doing so he sealed the film as cinema rather than a tv adaptation (that distinction was already on the blur with the likes of The Sopranos) and gives the conclusion a timeless feel that might just as easily be from the end of the '60s as from Broderick's own Ferris Bueller '80s. This was significantly produced by MTV and if you saw it at a cinema in 1999 the logo animation might have caused a few stirrings of unease. Were we about to see a sellout teen comedy with incomprehensibly rapid editing, less substantial that the air between the nuggets of our popcorn?
It didn't turn out that way. Payne made sure he gave a shot of wit in the first few minutes and kept it up. If you look now at his rap sheet you might be struck by the kind of middle aged social realist comedy taking up most of the list. Sideways, The Holdovers, Nebraska. There's not great contradiction, here, Payne is interested in the depths of his characters' humanity, he just started young.
Election is available through Stan, Paramount+ (subscription), online renters like Prime, Apple or Google.
