Its star a decidedly pudgier character than that of his bravura bad-boy role as a high-school truant, Election finds in Matthew Broderick the perfect hypocrite. And yet every main character in the film exhibits this same hypocrisy, just to different degrees. And so he’s far from alone—he just happens to be helming the ship.
Election can sometimes be entertaining, even if this entertaining is that of an over-the-top satire in which repeated excess is the substitute for wit and subtlety. Tracy Flick is an overambitious and snotty-nosed cheater without the slightest hint of self-awareness, just as her civics teacher happens to be an adulterer who gives to his pedophile colleague a talking-to about his choices. Almost from the first, the film lets us see where it’s going, and it exhausts itself once the chisel of its derision becomes dulled by so much banging—then it keeps going.
The film becomes less and less stimulating and at last grinds to a halt as the pathetic, vengeful, and one-dimensional Jim McAllister lives out his days in big-city ignominy. While making its point, Election lacks the substance and the structure to make it well, and with the elusive subtlety that doesn’t have to repeat itself gratingly as though the contempt of its director weren’t already the hand smothering each of its characters. The real Jim McAllister does not exist—not because he is fictitious, but because he could never exist in the world, where human beings are never so flimsy, and never at the service of a derisive satire.
