Election (1999 film)

This article is about the 1999 film Election. For the film of the same name of 2005, see Election (2005 film).

Election
File:Election poster.jpg
Directed by	Alexander Payne
Written by	Novel: Tom Perrotta Screenplay: Alexander Payne Jim Taylor
Produced by	Albert Berger Ron Yerxa David Gale Keith Samples Van Toffler (executive producer) Jim Burke (co-producer) Jacobus Rose (co-producer)
Starring	Matthew Broderick Reese Witherspoon Chris Klein
Release dates	April 23, 1999 (US, limited release) May 7, 1999 (US, wide release)
Running time	103 min.
Language	English

Election is a 1999 film adapted from a critically acclaimed 1998 novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta. The plot revolves around a three-way election race in high school that satirizes high school life and politics. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for Witherspoon in the Best Actress category.

It stars Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon and Chris Klein and is set in suburban Omaha, Nebraska and is the story of Jim McAllister (Broderick) and Tracy Flick (Witherspoon). McAllister is a high school teacher whose enthusiastic involvement with various school-related functions masks his frustration with other aspects of his life. Tracy is an overachiever whose obsession with getting into a good college masks both a vindictive, manipulative and sexual side. When Tracy obtains a nomination for class president in the school election, McAllister believes she does not deserve the title, and tries his best to stop her from winning.

The film gained much attention commercially and critically in 1999, mainly because of word-of-mouth and high critical praise, while it failed to become a major box office success, home video and DVD releases were extensively popular, and the film achieved a cult classic status. Following its release, the movie has received various rankings, Election is ranked #61 on Bravo's 100 Funniest Movies, Witherspoon's performance as Flick was ranked at #45 on the list of the 100 Greatest Film Performances of All Time by Premiere Magazine, and #9 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies. Since its release, it has been credited with inspiring several other high school set films, dealing with the student overthrowing the teacher.

Plot outline

Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) is a high-school teacher in Omaha, Nebraska (the novel is set in New Jersey) whose enthusiastic involvement at school masks his frustration with other aspects of his life. Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is an overachieving senior with a secret vindictive and sexual side. Earlier in the year, Tracy had an affair with McAllister's best friend, another teacher. As a result, her lover was fired from his job, divorced by his wife, and ended up a ruined man; Tracy, however, walked away with no one knowing of her involvement.

Tracy announces that she is running for student-body president, horrifying McAllister, who is in charge of organizing the school's student government and doesn't want to have to work with Tracy. (He also seems afraid that, like his friend, he will be tempted into an affair with her.) He decides to teach Tracy a lesson in humility by introducing some competition into the election, and convinces the rich but naive jock Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run against Tracy. Paul agrees, not because he wants to humiliate Tracy, but because he wants to find a purpose in his life besides sports.

Meanwhile, Paul's lesbian younger sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) is dumped by her lover, Lisa (Frankie Ingrassia), who says that she is straight and was just "experimenting". Lisa quickly becomes Paul's new girlfriend and campaign manager, in part to anger Tammy. Tammy decides to run for president to spite her brother and Lisa with a platform that student government is a sham.

The competitive, ambitious Tracy is willing to employ any Machiavellian means to win the election. The night before the election, she destroys all of her own campaign posters. Claiming innocence, she threatens legal action against the school when McAllister attempts to use her affair with his best friend to impeach Tracy's credibility. Tammy "confesses" she destroyed the posters, and her parents transfer her to a private parochial school for girls.

Jim McAllister is secretly attracted to his best friend's ex-wife, Linda,; the day before the school elections, they spontaneously have sex. Linda asks Jim to rent a motel room for a later rendezvous, but when he arrives at her house to pick her up, she isn't there. He returns home to find Linda and his wife talking together. Knowing he's been caught, he spends the night in his car. The next morning he oversees the counting of the election ballots at school. During this, he calls Linda several times, professing his love for her. Linda blames the whole affair on him, and his wife kicks him out of the house when he tries to apologize. He decides to move into the motel.

After all the ballots are counted, Tracy has won by one vote (we learn that Paul, who has no ill will towards Tracy and did not want to egotistically vote for himself, voted for her). McAllister is so angry that he secretly disposes of two of the pro-Tracy ballots, demands a re-count, and names Paul as the winner. When the janitor eventually finds the two discarded ballots, McAllister resigns from his job and becomes a pariah. Divorced and humiliated, he leaves town, becoming a tour guide at a museum in New York City. He claims that even if Tracy becomes rich and successful, she'll be miserable because she ruthlessly climbs the ladder of success without any time for fun.

Tracy gets accepted into her first-choice college, Georgetown University, though realizes she has few friends. Paul also gets into his first choice of a state college and continues to live with an optimistic "que sera sera" attitude, even when Lisa breaks up with him. Tammy loves Catholic school because she has met her next new girlfriend. Years later, Jim visits Washington, DC and sees Tracy as entering a limo with a congressman, obviously successful in life. He throws a soda cup at the car in anger and runs away. The film ends with Jim back in New York, enjoying teaching at the museum but resenting Type-A tourists who remind him of Tracy.

Satire and Themes

Much has been stated about the satirical nature of the film Election and its running themes regarding politics, ethics, morals, and high school social groups, and despite its initial appearance as a teenage comedy film, it operates on a number of thematically rich levels.

"Morals Versus Ethics"

One of the main themes of the film are morals versus ethics, which the film courts this with its opening scene where Tracy gives a rather long-winded answer to a class question about the difference between morals and ethics, reciting with cold detachment the dictionary definition of the two concepts. Both McAllister and Tracy have their own views on what is right and wrong (morals) but are shown to lack the ability to live by the code of ethics that they steadfastly believe in. Tracy is a firm believer in hard work and not letting her contempt for her fellow students blind her actions, yet caves into her hatred for Paul by destroying his posters in a fit of sabotage.

Meanwhile McAllister believes in a notion of moral absolutism (i.e. that certain things are right and wrong without exception) yet as the film progresses he finds himself unconsciously engaging in the philosophy of moral relativism (i.e. that there is no one set of moral standard and that what is morally acceptable depends solely on the situation at hand). Examples of this include McAllister absolving his friend and fellow teacher of any wrong-doing with regards to his relationship with Tracy, who becomes the villain who seduced and ruined her lover's life out of uncaring malice. His affair with his friend's ex-wife is also an example of this, since she is close friends with the family and is in need of emotional support, that he's not doing a bad thing by sleeping with her. This is quite ironic contrast though due to the fact that as part of McAllister's embracement of situational ethics with his vendetta against Tracy, he convinces himself that he has to screw Tracy out of the Presidency or else he'll be put into a situation where he'll have no choice but to give into his sexual attraction to Tracy.

"The Ends Justify The Means"

The rivalry between Tracy and McAllister is based upon McAllister's belief of the ends justify the means. In this case, McAllister sees Tracy as an evil, over-achieving, manipulative temptress who needs to be humbled and/or knocked down a peg so as to keep her from becoming student body president, which McAllister knows Tracy wants to be simply because it would make her college application even more desirable to colleges. When Tracy destroys her own posters, it only solidifies McAllister's belief that Tracy is evil and needs to be stopped, especially when she is able to use her rather false good girl image and threats of lawsuits against anyone using her slutty past against her to be cleared, while an innocent student takes the fall for her crime.

Some critics believe that the failure of McAllister's scheme to rob Tracy of the election is a critique the philosophy of the ends justify the means, pointing out the fact that as Jim becomes more and more obsessed with stopping Tracy, he becomes just as bad as Tracy and that his failure is his punishment for the extremes that he goes to in order to beat Tracy. This is tied into a defeatist theme that the film has, in that Tracy is able to get away with being evil and even get elected while people like McAllister, who mean well in wanting to stop people like Tracy, are doomed to face ruin as a result of them using their enemies' tactics against them.

Coke vs. Pepsi

Somewhat mocking the cola wars of the 1980s, the film many times parallels Jim and Tracy's relationship to that of the competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, with Tracy representing Coke and Jim Pepsi. The first scene where this is done is when Tracy Flick tells Jim McAllister that Coca-Cola is by far the number one soft drink in the world. Jim, while drinking a Pepsi one night, remembers Tracy talking about Coke, and that is what gives him the idea of getting Paul to join the election. Another scene is when Jim comes home from work. He opens the fridge and in there are cans of Coke. In the next scene him and his wife have sexual intercourse in their attempt to have a baby and he thinks of Tracy while making love to his wife. Pepsi machines typically are in view when Tracy faces opposition or obstacles in the election. Finally, in a closing scene, McAllister sees Tracy getting into a limo in Washington D.C. Jim, disgusted about where Tracy is and where his own life has gone, throws a Pepsi cup at the limo before cowardly running away.

Apples

Apples are seen many times throughout the movie and oftentimes they result in bad luck for one of the characters shortly after they are shown. For example, Jim talks to Paul about running for the election, asking him what his favorite fruit is. Paul says pears, but then changes it to apples. Jim then says think about how much you like apples and one day you are given an orange, a choice and that is what democracy is like. Soon after Paul decides to run, changing the luck of Tracy Flick for the worse. In another scene, apples are shown in a fruit basket at the Metzler household. Shortly after that happens, Lisa leaves Tammy Metzler for Paul, resulting in bad luck for Tammy and her joining the election to get back at Paul and Lisa. Probably the most well known scene for apples as an impending sign of bad luck is when Jim comes to pick up Linda to go back to the motel for the affair. He goes into the backyard where apples are on a tree. A bee stings him, and after that happens, many bad things happen to Jim, including the swelling of his eye, the collapse of his marriage and losing his job.

Characters and Main Cast

• Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick is an ambitious student determined to win her school election. She believes in hard work and ambition. Her drive can be attributed to her desire to be better than other people and she shows contempt for those who have wealth and popularity but don't appreciate it. Her contempt leads her to be malicious to her competitors, and to violate her own ethical standard by lashing out against Paul Metzler in spite of all his hard work and dedication.
• Matthew Broderick as Jim McAllister is a teacher who truly enjoys educating. His passion is with his work and the study of ethics. He cares about his students, but has contempt for those whose ambition gets in the way of their humanity. In spite of his lofty moral ideals, his contempt for Tracy renders him unable to live by his own ethical standard.
• Chris Klein as Paul Metzler is a kind, generous, and extremely popular star athlete running in the student election. His inherited fortune, popularity and high ethical standard serves as the foil for both Tracy and McAllister, since he has what both of them strives for but cannot achieve. His generosity and kindness eventually contribute to his electoral defeat.
• Jessica Campbell as Tammy Metzler is the outcast lesbian sister of Paul Metzler. She hides her sexuality from most people but secretly has a romance with her best friend, Lisa, who leaves Tammy after declining her sexual advances. Tammy is also running in the student election, but is only doing so to spite Lisa who is her brother's campaign manager.

Supporting Cast

• Phill Reevs as Walt Hendricks
• Molly Hagan as Diane McAllister
• Colleen Camp as Judith R. Flick
• Mark Harelick as Dave Novotny
• Delaney Driscoll as Linda Novotny

Pre-Production and Direction

The novels rights were sold to director Alexander Payne in January 1997. Payne had initially aimed to use Millard North High School in Omaha, but the School Board of Millard found the script too obscene and inappropriate. The setting was then moved to a school in the suburb of Omaha, Papillion-La Vista High School – this is why Papillion-La Vista High School background noise can be heard during much of the film, by actual teachers and students, because filming took place during school terms. According to commentary by Alexander Payne, in the scene where Jim watches pornography in the basement, the basement was left unaltered.

Scenes in the film were shot in and around the Omaha area, including Dundee, West Omaha, Bellevue (American Family Inn, where the sign reads "Welcome Seed Dealers"), Carter Lake and Papillion (the school scenes). Other scenes were filmed in New York (including the college scene, which was actually filmed at Adelphi University in Long Island) and Washington D.C. Production shut down for about a month when a freak fall snowstorm hit Omaha in October 1997, knocking down trees and power lines.

Direction

Payne had become interested, and an eventual fan of the bestselling novel, of which the film is based on. The theme from Navajo Joe (which was also used at the end of Kill Bill: Vol. 2) plays in the background when Tracy finds out that Paul is running for office and also when she rips up his posters. Interestingly, rumours abound that Payne had become disillusioned with the way the film was heading. In addition, within the text of a newspaper article in the film, the following can be read: "If you've paused the film in order to read this entire article, your time would be better spent renting Citizen Ruth from your local video store, which was another Payne film. Do you know how hard it is to write these fake few stories for newspaper movie props? I've got better things to do." For the school assembly scenes, Payne had to use special effects to make the gym look full. As Payne said on the commentary, some students learned that being an extra wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and that left the assembly scene lacking in students. Payne filmed a select group of students sitting in different spots for multiple takes, and then (using digital editing) filled in the blanks to make it look like a packed gym.

Casting

Several actors were cast in place of Broderick, Witherspoon, Klein and Campbell and turned it down because of the high-risk content and creative differences. Most notably, Thora Birch, who was experiencing the peak of her career because of the success of the Oscar-winning American Beauty was cast as Metzler, left Omaha due to creative differences with Alexander Payne. Many of the remaining cast members were scouted on location, including the janitor that appears at the beginning and end of the movie. He is an actual janitor that works for the director's offices in Omaha, Nebraska. He was formerly a janitor at Duchesne Academy in Omaha, NE. He has now since retired.

Also, the casting director of the movie is the football player that appears in the adult movie that McAllister watches. Many local Omaha students and teachers were used in the film for the roles of students and teachers. One in particular was Chris Klein, who would end up becoming a mainstay in Hollywood and star in other movies. Payne found him when he was scouting schools for locations to shoot and a teacher at one of the schools introduced him to Klein. Witherspoon had been acting in moderately well-received films in the early 1990s. Nick D'Agosto, who appeared towards the end of the film as committee chairman Larry Fouch, was just a student at Creighton Preparatory School in Omaha, the same high school Payne attended, when he did this movie. He would go on to college at Marquette University in Milwaukee before moving out to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. He now plays the role of West, Clarie Bennet's boyfriend, on NBC's Heroes

Release and reception

The film helped revive the career of Matthew Broderick, who had been out of the public spotlight for some time prior to the film's release. As of July 8th 2007 Rotten Tomatoes had given it a rating of 90% and 94% in the cream of the crop section.

Differences between novel and film

• The novel is set in New Jersey in 1992.
• In the novel's end, Jim McAllister becomes a car salesman rather than a museum tour guide.
• In the novel, McAllister does not move away to New York.
• In the novel, McAllister's wife forgives him after he cheats on her and the two remain married.
• In the novel, McAllister's wife finally becomes pregnant with their first child.
• In the novel's end, McAllister asks for Tracy's forgiveness for what he did, and she accepts. There is also an implication that the two will become closer, possibly to the point of an affair.
• In the novel, Tammy ends up hating her parochial school because they are too strict, rather than not strict at all as portrayed in the movie. She ends up as friendless as before and the girl that spurred the decision to go to the private school is heterosexual.
• In the novel, we never see the future of Tracy's lover, Dave. We only know that Jim meets him in a bar a few months after and he has gained a lot of weight from living with his parents. He also seems still obsessed with Tracy because not long into the conversation he asks if she is seeing anyone else.
• In the novel, the boy who counted the votes (named Larry Fouch in the film, played by Nick D'Agosto) was a much more active character named Larry DiBono. He was a senior and the outgoing president; he also had a very big crush on Tracy. A year later when he is at college, Tracy calls him up to invite him to prom only to find out that he now has a girlfriend and Tracy missed her chance.
• In the novel, the janitor was not taking revenge on McAllister for spilling the Chinese food. Besides working as a janitor, he was the landlord and very close friend of Tracy and her mother. He exposed Jim's scheme after finding out that Tracy lost by a vote from Larry DiBono.
• In the novel, Tracy Flick was, rather than a geek, portrayed as very attractive. She is viewed as "hot" by the entire school, including Dave, Jim, and the school principal. Paul the jock summed it up in the sentence, "she has this ass" and also noted that people are still talking about "the cut-offs she wore last semester". Though Tracy thinks that she is ugly, she knows she has a body and uses it to the best of her advantage, notably in wearing a clingy red dress the day of the class speeches, the day of the election, and the day she ran back into McAllister at the end of the novel.

In pop culture

• Election had a big influence on The OC. In The OC, the third season features an episode homage to the plot.
• Scary Movie (2000), a parody of teen and horror films, features a character strikingly similar to Tracy Flick.
• Reese Witherspoon's performance as Tracy Flick in the film is ranked #45 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time (2006).
• A GEICO commercial advertising car replacements made subtle references to the film. A woman whose car is being repaired is running in the street to school using a cherry smoke bomb to signal her changing lanes. On her rear end is a bumper sticker saying "My Daughter is an Honor Student at Carver Elementary". The woman is yelling towards a blonde little girl (who looks like a younger Reese Witherspoon) "Tracy!"

External links

• Election at IMDb
• Election at Metacritic