Gone are the days of Matthew Broderick cutting class to have a joyride around Chicago, now he's all grown up and playing the average middle-class Social Studies teacher at your local high school. Election follows the stories of four different people through the election of the next class president. Tracy Flick (played by a much younger Reece Witherspoon) is the power-house over-achiever that begins the election by running unopposed. Paul Metzler, a popular football player who's IQ wouldn't surpass that of a 6th grader's, is set up by Mr. McAllister (Broderick) to run against, and hopefully beat, Tracy. Why would a teacher intentionally sabotage the victory of one of his students? Probably because she got his friend, and fellow teacher at the high school, fired for sleeping with her. To round out the candidates for the election is sophomore Tammy Metzler, Paul's angsty younger sister whose sexuality scared off her best friend and into the arms of her brother. Tammy's out to take down her brother and his girlfriend (her ex-bestie), Paul's running because it sounds fun, Tracy loves control so why wouldn't she run, and amidst all this is Mr. McAllister who's trying to deal with his child-less, love-less marriage.
The first hour of the movie is the most interesting editing wise because it is setting up the back stories for all the characters before they come together. Much of the story-telling is done through these long tangents off of the main story before flashing back to present time. The movie begins with Mr. McAllister going through his daily routine of working out and cleaning up at then school, before heading to his classroom to begin the day. On his walk to class, he passes Tracy, already set up and ready for the future voters of America. Up until this point, the camera followed behind Mr. McAllister as he made his way around the school. When he finishes talking with Tracy, instead of following him, the camera stays on Tracy and we hear a voice over of her tell the audience that if you mess with destiny, you suffer. Cut back to Mr. McAllister where he discusses his love of teaching and assisting students over a montage of scenes of him helping crying teens and winning teaching awards. After the montage, we're in Mr. McAllister's classroom getting a lesson on morals and ethics. He asks the class questions and before he can even finish each one, Tracy's hand is first to shoot up into the air. When he finally calls on her, we get a lovely freeze-frame of her face before cutting to the first tangent. For about 7 minutes, you get a back story on what an over-achiever Tracy is and her relationship with a teacher, by the time the camera cuts back to the freeze-frame of Tracy's face, you've forgotten you were even on a tangent. The movie follows this pattern, cutting off to tangents when the other candidates, Paul and Tammy, are introduced. The thing that kept this movie interesting was that you didn't stay with one person for very long. They're all interconnected by this election and although each of the four main characters had problems they were dealing with, often their problems stemmed from one another.
This movie is one of those coming-of-age films, each character grows, in their own respect, from situations that had held them down early in the film. This can be seen mostly through the growth of Tammy Metzler, the unpopular sophomore who entered the election to sabotage her brother and ex-friend. Tammy is first introduced to us as a burn-out who just lost her only friend, but by the end of the movie, she's got the whole school chanting her name after an empowering campaign speech.
The editing in this film reminds me of a lot of Tarantino films. Like how Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs cut to different times and places throughout the films, Election does something similar with the tangents it breaks off into. At the very beginning of the film, to show the many achievements of Tracy Flick, the camera flips through the school's yearbook going to different clubs and activities Tracy has participated in. Wes Anderson's film Rushmore uses the exact same sequence to show the accomplishments of another over-achiever Max Fisher. They way that this film flows, seamlessly changing focus of who the main character is as a new character is introduced (following Mr. McAllister then focussing on Tracy when she's introduced), is similar to the flow of the film Slacker. Told through a series of vignettes, Slacker would follow one character for a couple of minutes before another character was introduced, and the focus would shift to that new character's story until another character came along. When Tracy discovers that Paul is running against her and when Tammy discovers her ex-bestie is dating her brother, their eyes narrow and we here this African war music begin to play, suggesting that high school is a cut-throat jungle. Another film to make this comparison is the classic Mean Girls. When Regina George fusses over Aaron right in front of Caty, Caty imagines how this would be settled in the animal world (jumping across the table and attacking her), but in the girl world all fighting was sneaky.
I'm giving this film 4/5 flames because it's one of the better high school films that I've seen. They characterized the teens in the film well enough that I could actually relate to how they felt and it didn't make high school appear cheesy like in most films.
