Election

This twisted little dark indie comedy uses the setting of a high school student government election to satirize the petty conflicts and lust for power that frequently mark real politics. While this may sound like an amazing premise, Election doesn’t totally deliver. When compared to other political dark comedies like In The Loop or Dr. Strangelove, Election is neither as cynically funny nor as compelling and the result is something that seems to imagine itself a lot cleverer than it actually is.

One of the hardest things to look past with Election is that it is full of wildly unlikeable characters. Discussing the likeability of characters can be a bit of a controversial subject. Cinema purists see the “need” for likeable characters as a Hollywood affectation that limits creativity and popularists will say that likeable characters are necessary because viewers demand them; for what good is art with no audience? My general feeling is that the discussion shouldn’t be about likeable characters but about unlikeable ones. The television show Veep has basically no likeable characters. They are all terrible people. But they are incredibly funny in their witty, snarky mean-spiritedness; engrossing in their self absorption and self destruction; and humanised by the relatability of their shortcomings and so they avoid being unlikeable despite their numerous and obvious flaws. However, unlikeable characters create apathy in the viewer as they recognize that none of the characters are worth investing in, rooting for, or understanding emotionally, and so there is little reason to care if they succeed or fail, live or die. The problem with Election is not a lack of likeable characters but an abundance of unlikeable ones.

Tracy Flick is a manipulative sociopath who will stop at nothing to win. She is the living embodiment of unbridled ambition and every negative attribute that goes with that. She uses people, lies, cheats, and is a sore loser, all while being strangely naive about the fact that her strategy, asocial policy based campaigning, is incompatible with the game she is playing, the inherently social world of politics. The teacher attempting to stand in her way, Jim McAllister, may be a beloved civics teacher, but he is also a petty, philandering, opportunistic dunce who turns a blind eye to a grossly inappropriate relationship between a student and their teacher. The school’s principal seems perfectly open to the administration influencing the election, as long as it falls short of actually changing the votes. Only the football star turned candidate Paul and his sister Tammy come across as worth the air they breathe. Paul is a goofy, well meaning guy with the personality of a golden retriever, which makes him very hard not to like but also casts him as the movie’s fool. Tammy has a rich and complex personal struggle with sexual identity and her family life that, while not making her a great person, at least gives you a reason to care about her and her piece of the story. Unfortunately, these two play the smallest role of the key four characters in the central drama.

A narrative device of the film is accompanying expository scenes with an inner monologue voiceover from whichever character is currently the point of view. This jumps mostly from Mr. McAllister, who is the closest this film gets to a traditional protagonist, to Tracy Flick and back again, though occasionally the film also dips into the thoughts of Paul and Tammy. This use of inner monologue is helpful at expanding our understanding of the characters and could have been used to ground their mistakes and foibles in a way that would humanize them and make them less unlikeable. The movie actually does this quite well with Tammy and her struggles, but where Flick and McAllister are concerned, it largely does the opposite. It seemed that the more I learned of their inner workings and motivations the more I viewed them as ultimately unredeemable.

Election also fails to be as pointedly cynical as other political dark comedies. While it tries to make a depressing point about the futility of stopping driven, conniving people from reaching their ends, it trips itself up on its own plot. Half the terrible things that happen to McAllister come from his own poor decision making irrespective of his feud with Tracy and half the things that make Tracy despicable have nothing to do with her quest to win the election, but rather from her much deeper existential need to be seen as exceptional. So, while it is funny at times to watch the wild lengths these two will go to sway something as ultimately meaningless as a student body election, the broader satirical point about politics, power, and popularity falls a little flat.

I’m sure there is a niche for this film’s brand of soft cynicism and off-beat satire, but I’m not in it. For a movie so focused on character drama, I found both halves of the central antagonism were simply too unlikeable to invest myself in the outcome of their conflict.

Would Recommend: If what you are looking for in a political satire set at a high school is a little more high school and a little less politics.

Would Not Recommend: If you need someone to root for in your movies, even the bleakest and most cynical ones.