Muddle America
Alexander Payne's trenchant social comedy wins by a landslide.

ELECTION
With Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon
Written by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
Directed by Alexander Payne

BEHIND THE MANICURED LAWNS, tastefully decorated homes and family motels on the edge of town, sunny Omaha has a problem. It's the people who live there, and especially Tracy Flick, who's running for student government president at Carver High School with slogans like "Pick Flick" and "Sign Up for Tomorrow Today."

Tracy is the girl with the shiny Goldilocks curls and bright eyes who raises her hand stiff and high when Mr. McAllister, her dedicated social studies and world affairs teacher, asks who can explain the difference between "morals" and "ethics." But he calls on someone else because -- well, he's just a little uncomfortable with Tracy since she got caught having an affair with Mr. Novotny, who is now the school's former math teacher.

With her ambition, intellect and bubbling school spirit, Tracy (Reese Witherspoon) looks like the perfect student government leader -- on paper. But Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) knows we have to be careful about girls like Tracy. So he recruits Paul Metzler, a dopey, good-hearted football player and all-around popular guy who broke a leg skiing and now needs something else to do on behalf of his school. Then, Paul's lesbian sister Tammy, whose family doesn't know about her proclivities, enters the race on a platform that only an outcast could so purposefully espouse: None of this bullshit matters, so vote for me and I'll shut the system down.

This is how the orderly mayhem unfolds in Election, a funny, trenchant, multi-layered social comedy by Alexander Payne, who directed the clumsy abortion satire Citizen Ruth a few years back. Since then, he must have eaten his Wheaties: Election is unerringly incisive in the way it dissects middle America and the lies people tell themselves -- and genuinely believe -- to get through all the rules of the day. His movie is pungent without being cruel (unlike the Coen brothers) and perverse without being sadistic (unlike David Lynch).

Payne and his co-writer, Jim Taylor, have conceived an integrated satire with humor that's perfectly situational, and with both a profound sense and a cutting-edge sensibility to every joke and character. As Election grows more corrosive and bizarre, it also gets more palpable and complex. Payne nimbly manipulates his stereotypes and clichés to find the place where cultural expectation meets the furtive appetites of human nature. He even finds a way to sympathize with Tracy, a young woman (one strike against her already) who tries too hard to compensate for being pretty (but not beautiful), and who's being raised by a single mother who writes admiring letters to famous women (like Connie Chung), yet who still finds subtle ways to shatter her daughter's self-esteem without even realizing it.

In Citizen Ruth, Payne didn't seem to know how to loosen his actors up and still make them seem like satirical objects. In Election, he does it with ease, although his casting probably helped. For Broderick, who has always been deft at playing befuddled eagerness that turns almost accidentally corrupt, think of Election as a droll and mature companion piece to his cult favorite, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And for Witherspoon, whose range as an actress is still rather limited, it's the pert, sparkling, poisonous role she was born to play.