Election (1999 film)

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

Theatrical poster
Directed by Alexander Payne
Produced by David Gale
Written by Tom Perrotta (novel)
Alexander Payne
Jim Taylor (screenplay)
Starring Reese Witherspoon
Matthew Broderick
Chris Klein
Jessica Campbell
Music by Rolfe Kent
Cinematography James Glennon
Editing by Kevin Tent
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
MTV Films
Release date(s) May 7, 1999
Running time 102 min.
Country Flag of the United States
Language English
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

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. It tells the story of Jim McAllister (Broderick), a teacher at a local high school, and one of his students, Tracy Flick (Witherspoon), around the time of the school's student body elections. McAllister's 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 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. The film was rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for strong sexuality, sex-related dialogue and language, and a scene of drug use.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) is a high-school teacher in the suburbs of 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 popular but rather dim 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 after he was taken off the team for a leg injury.

Meanwhile, Paul's younger sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) - who is sexually involved with another girl at the school - 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, in a fit of uncharacteristic rage, she destroys all of Paul's 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 then "confesses" she destroyed the posters, and her parents transfer her to a private parochial school for girls.

Jim is secretly attracted to his best friend's ex-wife, Linda. The day before the school elections, they spontaneously begin to kiss passionately. 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. Jim is forced to move into a low-budget motel.

After all the ballots are counted, Tracy has won by one vote (Paul, who has no ill will towards Tracy and did not want to egotistically vote for himself, had voted for her). McAllister is so angry that he secretly disposes of two of the pro-Tracy ballots, demands a recount, and names Paul as the winner. When a janitor discovers 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 (several scenes earlier in the film suggest that Tracy has few if any friends at school).

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 the all-girl Catholic school, where she has met her new girlfriend. Years later, on a visit to Washington, DC, Jim sees Tracy entering a limo with a congressman from her home state in Nebraska, obviously successful in life. He throws a milk shake at the car in anger and runs away. The film ends with Jim back in New York, enjoying teaching at the museum but resenting a Type-A elementary student who reminds him of Tracy.

[edit] Cast of characters

  • Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Enid 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 inherent fortune, popularity and high ethical standard serves as the foil for both Tracy and McAllister, since he has what both of them strive 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 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.

[edit] Supporting cast

[edit] Pre-production and direction

The novel's 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.[citation needed] 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.[1] According to commentary by Alexander Payne, in the scene where Jim watches pornography in the basement, the basement was left unaltered.[1]

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.

[edit] Direction

Payne had become a fan of the bestselling novel by Tom Perrotta on which the film is based. The novel was inspired by two key events. The first was the 1992 Bush vs Clinton election campaign, in which Ross Perot entered as a third party candidate (a move echoed by Tammy Metzler). The second was an incident in which a prom queen was disqualified by a teacher because she was pregnant.

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.

[edit] 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.[citation needed] Most notably, Thora Birch was cast as Tammy Metzler, but left due to creative differences with Alexander Payne.[1] 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 since retired.[citation needed]

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.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] 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, Claire Bennet's boyfriend, on NBC's Heroes.

[edit] Differences between novel and film

  • The novel is set in a suburban community in New Jersey in 1992, while the film is set in a suburban community outside of Omaha, Nebraska and set during the present day.
  • 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. He even mentions that the community forgave him eventually.
  • 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. She winds up being as friendless as before, and her new "girlfriend" turns out to be 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 still seems obsessed with Tracy; 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 crush on Tracy. A year later, when he is at college, Tracy calls him up to invite him to the prom only to find out that he now has a serious girlfriend and Tracy had missed her chance.
  • In the novel, the janitor was not taking revenge on McAllister for spilling 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 from Larry DiBono that Tracy had lost by a vote.
  • In the novel, Tracy Flick was 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 is also mentioned as being quite busty 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.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c Trivia for Election. at the Internet Movie Database.

[edit] External links