Alexander Payne's second feature. Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. The high-school-election satire that has aged into one of the most-prescient American films of the late 1990s.
Carver High School, suburban Omaha, 1996. Tracy Flick is the overachieving senior whose pursuit of student-body president has been the central organising fact of her high-school career. Jim McAllister is the popular American-government teacher whose marriage is deteriorating, whose best friend has just been fired from the school for a sexual relationship with Tracy, and whose resentment of Tracy has progressively built across her academic career. As the unopposed presidential election approaches, McAllister recruits popular football player Paul Metzler to run against Tracy. Paul's sister Tammy also enters the race after a romantic break-up.
The film tracks the campaign across approximately several weeks. The central plot mechanic involves McAllister's escalating willingness to interfere with the election to deny Tracy victory — culminating in his theft and disposal of two student-vote ballots that would have given Tracy the win. The fraud is eventually discovered; McAllister loses his job, his marriage, and his community standing; Tracy proceeds to Georgetown University and to subsequent professional success. The film closes with an extended epilogue tracking Tracy's continued ascent and McAllister's continued decline.
Election was, in 1999, received as a sharp but conventional high-school satire — well-crafted, well-performed, commercially modest ($14m worldwide on a $25m budget). Across the subsequent two and a half decades, the film has been re-read in light of broader cultural shifts. The Tracy Flick character — competent, ambitious, methodically prepared, openly seeking conventional success — has been recognised as a recurring American type whose treatment in the film anticipates significant cultural patterns.
Hillary Clinton's 2008 and 2016 presidential candidacies, in particular, produced extensive comparison between Clinton's reception and the way the film treats Tracy Flick. The pattern — a competent, methodically-prepared, ambitious woman whose competence becomes the object of disproportionate hostility from male contemporaries — became a recognisable cultural framing that Election had identified almost two decades earlier. Tom Perrotta, the novelist whose source novel the film adapted, has, in subsequent interviews, addressed the comparison directly. He published a sequel novel (Tracy Flick Can't Win, 2022) that explicitly engages the contemporary cultural reception of the character.
Election's specific craft achievement is the structural ambiguity around McAllister's narrative voice. The film is, on its surface, told largely through McAllister's voiceover and from his perspective; the audience is given his interior framing of the events and his moral justifications for the actions he takes. The film does not, in any explicit way, refuse this framing.
What the film does is, instead, gradually reveal — through small visual details and through the gap between McAllister's voiceover claims and the audience's direct observation — that his framing is unreliable. The cumulative effect is that the audience progressively recognises that the protagonist whose perspective they have been receiving is the actual moral antagonist of the film. The technique is, in some sense, the film's central structural argument. McAllister's resentment of Tracy is not an aberration the film identifies and dismisses; it is the film's actual subject, and the audience's complicity in McAllister's framing across the runtime is part of what the film makes them confront.
Reese Witherspoon was 22 during production. The role of Tracy Flick required her to play a 17-year-old whose specific psychological-emotional register — the rigorous self-presentation, the controlled anger, the moments of genuine vulnerability beneath the surface — the broader teenage-girl-cinematic tradition had not produced as a credible type. Witherspoon's specific working approach — playing Tracy as a recognisable specific person whose ambition the film does not condescend to — produced one of the most-distinctive female-comedy leads of the late 1990s.
Witherspoon was nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globes for the role (she lost). She would go on to win Best Actress at the 2006 Oscars for Walk the Line; her career trajectory through Sweet Home Alabama (2002), Legally Blonde (2001), and her subsequent production-company work (Hello Sunshine) has, in some sense, been organised around the kind of competent-ambitious-female-protagonist Tracy Flick first established.