ELECTION
1999
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein, Jessica Campbell
Dir.: Alexander Payne
Plot: The irresistible force of Blonde Ambition.
Key line: ‘You can’t interfere with destiny. That’s why it’s destiny.’
This outstanding satire on American mores is based upon a novel by Tom Perrotta, which was in turn inspired by a real-life event. In 1992, a Wisconsin high school’s election for Homecoming Queen made headlines in the New York Times when students voted for an absent, pregnant girl and staff took it upon themselves to announce a different winner and burn the original ballots. From such petty nastiness, futile rebellion and control-freakery, big ideas are born. A year after Election was released, American power objected to Al Gore and burned the ballots in a supposedly adult Presidential election. And if Sarah Palin purchased some bleach, she would be Tracy Flick.
But Election is not some self-righteous anti-right-wing rant. Alexander Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor are far too smart for that. Although Jim McAllister (Broderick on top form) and Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon in one of this book’s greatest performances) could be ciphers for hypocritical liberalism and quasi-fascist conservatism respectively, they are too complicated, lovable, loathable and real to be so easily labelled and contained. What is certain is that the characters and performances make a potentially parochial movie about high school politics into inflammable material that never sacrifices a pure belly laugh for the sake of the opportunity to preach.
Set in Payne’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, Election deals with an on-campus war between cuddly, affable teacher McAllister and ambitious student Flick. Through voiceover, unreliable narration and brilliant use of techniques such as freeze-frame, we quickly learn that both are hiding their true selves between carefully constructed public images. While Tracy is actually hated by her fellow pupils, who give her what she wants because they are scared of her or bored with her, Jim is a frustrated victim of mid-life crisis who despises Tracy for her energy and positivity. Oh . . . and he also hates her because she slept with his friend Dave, who lost both marriage and teaching job while Tracy successfully painted herself as the innocent victim.
Mr Woman-Hater and Ms Daddy Issues meet their destinies when Tracy decides to run for student body President. She is going to be elected unopposed until Jim persuades handsome, popular, injured football jock Paul Metzler (Klein) to run against her. Things are further complicated when Paul’s lesbian rebel sister Tammy (Campbell), seeking revenge for Paul stealing her girlfriend, decides to throw her hat into the Presidential ring in an attempt to humiliate both Paul and the school in general.
While Jim’s life dissolves over a failed attempt to have an affair with Dare’s ex-wife Linda (while also dealing with his eye having been stung by a bee), Tammy sees Tracy destroying Paul’s election posters. Instead of snitching, Tammy confesses to the crime, thus fulfilling her wish to be expelled and being sent to a private all-girl school full of fellow dykes.
Jim meets his Waterloo because the nice guy he chose to stop Tracy is, actually, truly nice. Paul votes for Tracy, partly because he knows she’ll do a better job than him, but mainly because he thinks it’s arrogant to vote for oneself. When the votes are counted, Tracy has won – by one vote. With his life in tatters, Jim refuses to accept yet more evidence that he is unable to exercise power over anything. He throws away two of Tracy’s votes. And, of course, he is caught.
Having lost job, wife and home, Jim moves to New York and becomes a tour guide at the Natural History Museum. And the film ends with his last pathetic ‘meeting’ with Tracy. He sees her, from a distance, getting into a limousine with a renowned politician, looking rich, beautiful and successful beyond his wildest dreams at half his age. Jim throws an empty can at the limo . . . and runs away like a naughty schoolboy. The last we see, he is giving a museum tour to a group of children, furiously ignoring the one girl in the group who knows the answer to all of his questions, just as he was at the beginning of the movie, still simmering with revenge fantasies and unable to move on.
Good story, eh? But Election is storytelling plus; a fizzing, spitting beast full of stunning performances, wry dialogue, wonderfully witty and lyrical orchestral music, hilarious sight gags, bravura directorial flourishes . . . and Reese Witherspoon. The future fictional June Carter Cash is everything here that fawning critics said Nicole Kidman was in the bizarrely overrated To Die For, when she clearly wasn’t. Her Tracy Flick is so terrifying, unstoppable, intimidating, evil . . . but also sympathetic, funny, lonely, naive and full of the kind of rage that only someone who has been badly abused by the hypocritical McAllisters of this world can muster. She is the embodiment of that post-‘The Greatest Love Of All’ world where people believe that one will fulfil all one’s dreams by just being perky, pro-active, positive and believing that God or destiny or name-your-cosmic-benefactor has chosen you to be special. While the McAllisters of this world spin in ever-decreasing circles, agonizing over the parts of themselves that are selfish and cruel, Tracy is hard, straight lines and an embrace of inner darkness forged by the belief that other people are nothing more than obstacles to be crushed by those who are plainly more deserving of success. Or: Tracy is Margaret Thatcher. Jim is Gordon Brown.
There is a wonderful freeze-frame in the first classroom scene, where Payne stops and holds on Witherspoon’s face while she’s talking, and catches an exact moment where all of her features are heading in different directions, rendering her comically ugly. This should be a cruel, humiliating shot, but somehow, even here, without her having any knowledge of what Payne was going to do with her face, there is a spirit, an indomitability . . . and some kind of innate, instinctive understanding that this is the kind of face that this kind of person makes in an unguarded moment. It’s a connection between director and actress that defies logic and heads right into magic, and makes a rule-breaking entirely static shot into one of the most memorably funny and endearing images in modern cinema.
Witherspoon is matched most of the way by Matthew Broderick. It’s perhaps especially unavoidable in a book about teen movies, but you really can see Ferris Bueller (see here) in Jim McAllister. I mean, it’s obvious that the Ferris we meet in 1986 is a boy who has peaked too soon. And, despite the fact that Broderick is 37 years old by Election time, there is something of the gawky teenage boy dressing up like a man about him, like a less supernatural Tom Hanks in Big. You can read Jim as Ferris, heading downhill all the way from his superhero childhood, accepting a middle-ranking life as a middle-ranking teacher with a dull marriage, convincing himself he’s still the populist school hero by arse-licking his way to Teacher Of The Year awards, being the all-round good egg not out of decency, but self-regard. There is something in Broderick’s ever-present bland smirk and kind, gentle eyes that he understands only too well, a kind of very American, have-a-nice-day friendliness masking a deeply cynical, misanthropic bitterness about having to be nice to anyone.
Most of the comic pleasure of Election comes from the continuous disconnect between the voiceover narrations of Tracy and Jim, and what we see them actually doing. As such, Election is not just a great film about revenge, school, sex, politics, popularity and the difference between winners and losers. It’s also a spectacular study of the lies we all tell ourselves in order to construct a self-image we can live with. While Jim McAllister may continue lying to himself about his usefulness through another couple of broken marriages and career failures, you come out of Election suspecting that Tracy’s delusions will, at some point not too far away, hit her with an awful powerful showerful of truth, and she will stagger under its weight. Like Ferris, she may have won this round. But she has peaked too soon. The best testament to Payne, Taylor and Reese Witherspoon is that, even though Tracy Flick is a wholly believable right-wing monster, we know she is really a victim and hope that the truth doesn’t hit her too hard. As teen comedy characters go, Tracy Flick i
s one unusually resonant chick.
THE VIRGIN SUICIDES
1999
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, Kathleen Turner, James Woods, Hanna R. Hall, A.J. Cook, Leslie Hayman, Chelse Swain, Scott Glenn, Danny DeVito, Giovanni Ribisi (Narrator)
Dir.: Sofia Coppola
Plot: The Girl you never get over.
Key line(s): ‘What are you doing here, Honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.’
‘Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.’
In 1974 in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, five beautiful blonde sisters kill themselves. They are aged between 13 and 17, and they are popular and wealthy and loved by their parents, and no one knows why. They have great taste in romantic FM pop, too. And that shit will stick with you.
The debut feature film of Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter Sofia is a faithful adaptation of Jeffery Eugenides’ unconventional 1993 novel. It introduces the world to Coppola’s elegant compositions, emotional distance and ability to make images sing like her favourite art-pop records. It is, from the moment a boy jumps out of a window to prove his love for another teenage girl, a film about the adolescent male’s worship of budding female sexuality.
But, like the novel, it’s not about the causes of suicide. The girls’ parents, played with understated power by James Woods and Kathleen Turner, are Christian conservatives who, for reasons that they never go into, attempt to shelter their daughters from boys, sex and the outside world. They are part of a repressed community who are continuing to live a ’50s suburban lifestyle in the ’70s, like the ’60s never happened. There is a backdrop of ’70s recession, and many suggestions, from strikes to the closure of local industries, that Grosse Pointe is about to enter the steep decline that hit Michigan in the wake of the closures of the car factories. And one of the girls gets ill-treated by a handsome cad.
But The Virgin Suicides doesn’t blame any of these factors. The film stops way short of accusing Christianity of destroying young lives. The Lisbons are fine for money. These girls are not afraid to disobey rules. They openly mock their parents’ boundaries when a boy is invited round for dinner, and relentlessly tease the neighbourhood boys, one of whom is our excellent narrator. They have sex when their parents aren’t looking. The film pokes fun at Ronald Lisbon’s boring obsession with model planes, but not his and Sara Lisbon’s parental grief and suffering. There is obviously something wrong with their marriage because they never talk to each other, but there is no violence or conflict. This is not a critique of religion or repressive parenting. Its blend of wry comedy and poetic elegy for doomed youth doesn’t even go as far as painting the events as tragedy. We only know these girls are suicidal because they kill themselves. In The Virgin Suicides, teenage suicide is a beautiful romantic mystery.
The film begins with a failed suicide attempt by youngest sister Cecilia (Hall) and our introduction to the boys who worship the Lisbon sisters from afar. The parents are advised by Danny DeVito’s bemused child psychiatrist to allow their girls to socialize with boys their own age. The parents throw a party, and the boys come, all togged out in their suited and booted Sunday School best.
But the gently amusing pleasures of watching junior gigolos trying to flirt with Mom Lisbon turn dark upon the arrival of Joe, a Down’s Syndrome boy who is used like a performing animal by the neighbourhood children. Cecilia is so appalled by and alienated from her peers’ idea of entertainment that it appears to be the last straw. She excuses herself from the party, goes upstairs, jumps out of a window and impales herself on the garden fence.
The theme of disconnection and secrecy is neatly summed up by a scene where Scott Glenn’s priest Father Moody visits the bereaved family, and tries to encourage them to express their feelings, but gets absolutely nothing. Not only can none of the Lisbons talk to him but they cannot face each other either. They grieve separately, Dad watching football and being stiff upper lippy, Mom silently broken in the bedroom . . . and the girls? They don’t seem to care. They are arranged together in a bedroom as if posing to tease boys at a pyjama party, smiling silently, amused as always. The conspiracy they share is hidden, not just from priests and parents, but from us.
It’s as if they know exactly how we’ll look for clues and, like all good criminals, make sure they thoroughly clean up the crime scene. The boys get hold of Cecilia’s diary. Surely the source of her agony will be there! But all they get is the aimless logging of meals and mundane family incidents, forcing the boys to play amateur psychologists, perusing the way she dots her ‘i’s for evidence of neurosis. But eventually they find some snippy references to Lux’s crush on the garbage man, and the movie sweeps off into the sun-dappled romantic paradise that the boys project upon Lux (Dunst) and her fellow angels . . . a world so much more exciting and poignant than the dull, repressed and recession-hit world that they are forced to live in. ‘We felt the imprisonment of being a girl,’ Ribisi’s voiceover sighs, longingly . . . ‘We knew that the girls were really women in disguise; that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was really to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.’
As the Grosse Pointe community become increasingly obsessed with solving the mystery of Cecilia’s death wish, her remaining sisters are working on their own. They slip off the rails, led by Lux, who begins a relationship with school dreamboat Trip (Hartnett). He persuades Mr and Mrs Lisbon to allow him to take Lux to the prom using a promise to find dates for the other sisters so they can go as a group, and, after Trip and Lux are crowned Homecoming King and Queen, the pair pop Lux’s cherry, in time-honoured American teen tradition, on the school football field.
But Trip breaks Lux’s heart and the girls break their parents’ curfew. Mrs Lisbon responds by taking the girls out of school. Despite being imprisoned by their parents’ sexual paranoia, the resourceful girls stay connected to their boy worshippers by means of night-time light signals and playing each other gorgeous soft-rock love songs by Carole King, Todd Rundgren and the Bee Gees over the phone.
But Lux is a loose cannon, having sexual trysts with random men on the roof of the house, in full view of the voyeuristic boys. The exhibitionism that seems to fuel so much of the sisters’ behaviour reaches its inevitable extreme, when, as the Lisbon parents’ sleep, they invite the boys round. The boys believe they are there to aid a daring, romantic, midnight escape from Prison Lisbon. They are there to bear witness to a suicide pact.
The distraught Lisbons sell the house and move away from Grosse Pointe. But the town – and especially our hapless boys – never get over a tragedy that is never adequately explained. They are now men in suits, but, when they meet, all they do is go back over the events, trying to rationalise the irrational.
The Virgin Suicides is truly unlike any other teen movie, before or since. There is an obvious undercurrent of ‘Suburban America eats its young’ that looks back to disparate teen films by everyone from Nicholas Ray (see Rebel Without A Cause, here) to Brian De Palma (see Carrie, here) to Jonathan Kaplan (see Over The Edge, here), and informs future teen classics like Donnie Darko (see here), Elephant (see here) and Teeth (see here). But the film it most resembles is Robert Mulligan’s 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s tale of children and injustice in The Deep South, To Kill A Mockingbird. Like the earlier film, Coppola’s debut masterpiece endeavours to stay faithful to a classic novel, lifting parts of the text in voiceover form, while using a dreamlike magical realism to create a truly cinematic experience which delves deeply and credibly into the mindset of children attempting to come of age in a small, incestuous place that is trying to halt the tide of progress and change.
But The Virgin Suicides is about sex and death, not race and justice. It is cinema’s most poetic ode to adolescent female sexuality. Its use of music – the ’70s hits and the aesthetically similar romantic ambience of Air and Sloan – anticipates Donnie Darko’s rejection of pop as mere nostalgia or backdrop for party scenes, and elegantly dramatizes
the passion and warmth of teen love.
This film is the antidote to all those frat comedies about teenage boys who just want to get laid. That stuff is just what we say to each other to protect ourselves, to impress each other, to conspire in each other’s need to look invulnerable. When we are alone or honest, The Virgin Suicides is how teenage boys really feel about girls; that they are the universe’s most beautiful and awe-inspiring mystery, torturing us with their secret knowledge of love and sex and sensuality and smelling good, laughing conspiratorially at our dumb attempts to behave like equals. We worship you because, if we didn’t, the human race would cease to exist. And we pretend that we don’t because we have to preserve some dignity and self-esteem with which to do that hunting and gathering thing you don’t actually need us for any more.
And the deaths? A big fat red herring. There is no reason why, because the ’70s Grosse Pointe world, though repressive, is not brutal. The Lisbon sisters’ death wish is an insoluble mystery because teenage girls are insoluble mysteries, and because insoluble mysteries haunt us long after a tale is told. Closure enables you to move on. Loose ends keep us trapped in the past. Therein lies the tragic beauty of this perfect film.
2000s
FINAL DESTINATION
2000
Starring: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Seann William Scott
Dir.: James Wong
Plot: We’re all going to die. Amusingly.
Key line: ‘I don’t have a narcissistic deity complex. I’m not going Dahmer on you guys. This just is. There is a pattern for us all.’
The most commercially successful of our run of millennial teen shockers is unloved by critics. Horror fans disagree, investing money and love in a franchise that has so far produced five movies, nine books and a series of comic books. Not bad for an idea that began life as a rejected script for an episode of The X Files.
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