Election

I distinctly remember watching Election for the first time while eating a bowl of cereal that had gone tragically soggy because I was too mesmerized by the screen to keep chewing. There is something about the way Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick stares into the middle distance that makes you forget your Honey Nut Cheerios. It’s a film that feels like a brightly colored trap; it looks like a typical late-90s teen comedy, but it has the soul of a political thriller written by someone who has spent way too much time in a faculty lounge.

The Scariest Girl in Omaha

In 1999, the world was obsessed with the "Sundance Generation" and the idea that indie films could finally take over the multiplex. Alexander Payne (who later gave us Sideways and The Descendants) took a modest $25 million budget and created a miniature epic about the smallest stakes imaginable: a high school student council presidency. But in Payne’s hands, the race for the office of Carver High President feels as consequential as the Cold War.

Tracy Flick is, quite frankly, a force of nature. Reese Witherspoon delivers a performance that should be studied in lab conditions. She’s all clenched teeth and aggressive hand-raising. Looking back, it’s wild to realize that she was only 22 when she filmed this, yet she managed to embody every overachiever who ever made you feel inadequate for wanting a C-minus. She isn't a villain in the traditional sense, but she is a predator of productivity.

Opposing her is Jim McAllister, played by Matthew Broderick in what I consider his best role. Jim is the "cool teacher"—the guy who wears the sweater vests and actually cares about "the kids." But through Jim, the film exposes a specific kind of male fragility that has aged incredibly well. Jim McAllister’s life is a slow-motion car crash where the car is made of student council ballots and bad decisions. He decides to sabotage Tracy’s unopposed run not out of a sense of justice, but because he’s a small man who can't handle a young woman’s ambition. Watching the guy who played Ferris Bueller turn into a sweaty, desperate middle-aged mess is a stroke of casting genius. It’s like watching the 80s dream die in real-time.

The Art of Being Pathetic

The film’s brilliance lies in its structure. Payne uses multiple narrators, giving us the inner thoughts of the four main players. We get the dim-witted but lovable jock Paul Metzler (Chris Klein), whose internal monologue is as empty and peaceful as a summer sky. Then there’s his sister, Tammy (Jessica Campbell), a queer nihilist who enters the race just to burn the whole system down. Her speech in the gymnasium is probably the most honest thing ever put on celluloid regarding high school politics.

The cinematography by James Glennon uses these jarring freeze-frames and sharp edits that scream "1990s," but it never feels dated. Instead, it feels frantic, mirroring McAllister’s unraveling psyche. There’s a scene involving a bee sting that is so physically uncomfortable it makes me itch just thinking about it. That’s the "Modern Cinema" era at its best—taking the glossy production values of a studio like Paramount and using them to highlight the grotesque, unpolished reality of human behavior.

I’ve always felt that Election captures the pre-Y2K anxiety perfectly. There’s a sense that the structures we’ve built—schools, marriages, democracies—are all held together by Scotch tape and the fragile egos of people who are one bad day away from throwing a trash can through a window.

The 1999 Curse

Despite being a critical darling, Election was a bit of a ghost at the box office. It’s one of those "forgotten" gems that actually had a big studio behind it but failed to find its people until the DVD era. Why did it tank? Well, in 1999, audiences were lining up for The Phantom Menace and The Sixth Sense. MTV Films marketed this as a wacky teen romp, and when people sat down and realized they were watching a cynical deconstruction of the American Dream, they weren't sure whether to laugh or call their therapists.

It also suffered from being "too smart for its own good" in a decade where teen movies were expected to have a makeover montage and a prom scene. Election has no makeovers, and the only "prom-adjacent" event is a depressing tallying of votes in a dusty office. It’s a drama disguised as a comedy, and that tonal tightrope walk is hard to sell in a 30-second TV spot.

If you haven’t revisited this one lately, I promise it plays even better now. In an era of hyper-polarized politics, Tracy Flick and Jim McAllister feel less like caricatures and more like every news cycle we’ve endured for the last decade. It’s a sharp, mean, hilarious look at why we want power and what we’re willing to lose to get it.

Election remains the ultimate testament to the idea that the smallest circles often contain the most venom. It’s a film that refuses to give you a hero to root for, leaving you instead with a group of deeply flawed, recognizable humans. Whether you see yourself in the frantic ambition of Tracy or the quiet desperation of Jim, it’s a mirror that’s impossible to look away from—even if the reflection is wearing a really terrible sweater vest.