Election (1999)

We are closing the run on the most argued about film in it. Election works by giving four people a voiceover and making all four of them unreliable, so the movie never tells you who to side with. Jim McAllister thinks he is a good man being provoked. Tracy thinks she is being punished for wanting things. They are both partly right, and the film refuses to settle it, which is why people have been fighting about Tracy Flick for twenty five years.

It is Coen-adjacent in the way that matters. Payne takes a small ordinary world entirely seriously and finds it very funny, and he never protects his characters from themselves. The freeze frames, the four way narration, the escalating pettiness of a grown man ruining his life over a student council race, all of it is comedy built on an absolutely unsentimental view of people. Nobody in this film gets away with anything except the person you least want to.

Reese Witherspoon's performance is the reason it lasts. Tracy is exhausting, humourless and relentless, and the film keeps showing you the cost. She has no friends. She was taken advantage of by an adult and blamed for it. She works because working is the only thing that has ever reliably worked. Watch her cry in the car and then reapply her expression. That is the film's real argument.

The film asks a genuinely uncomfortable question. What is it about an ambitious young woman that makes a decent seeming man want to destroy her. Jim never articulates a reason he could say out loud, and every justification he offers is transparently about himself. Election was released in 1999 and this part of it has aged into something sharper than it was.

Watch how the affair with the previous teacher is handled. It is framed as a scandal Tracy caused. The adult loses his job and the film lets the school treat a fifteen year old as the guilty party. Payne does not underline it. It sits there, and it reframes everything about how Jim talks about her.

The ballots in the bin are the hinge of the whole film. Jim has a moment where he could still stop, alone, unobserved, and he does the thing anyway. Everything after that is a man discovering that consequences arrive slowly and then all at once. It is exactly the structure of A Simple Plan played for laughs.

And the ending refuses to give anyone peace. Tracy gets what she wanted and is still alone. Jim is in a new city with a new life and still cannot let it go, and the last thing he does is throw a drink at a car. Nobody learns anything, which is much funnier and much truer than an ending where somebody does.