Amusing and kind of like a much darker version of Ferris Buehler's Day Off, but there was an aspect to Election that kept me from loving it. The premise is that a high-school teacher (Matthew Broderick) has watched a colleague ruin his career by having a sexual relationship with a student (Reese Witherspoon), and rather than just controlling his own libido, prompts another student (Chris Klein) to run against her for class president in the hopes that she'll be defeated and he won't come in closer contact with her. I could never really get over that, especially as the young woman's ambition and intelligence was the target for a lot of the satire, as if the teacher who commented about how wet her pussy got was the victim, and not her. As there was no real harm to the girl and Broderick's character himself begins to fantasize about her, it's as if the behavior is normalized, which made me cringe.
It's not that Broderick's character isn't pilloried either though, because he is. He goes from trying to teach the kids the difference between ethics and morality to cheating on his wife and throwing his own career away, which I loved about the film. Talk about a rigged election. And while it feels like we've seen this kind of plot before, the multiple narrators and Klein's character, who is so good-natured, buoy the film. I also liked the third candidate, his bi-curious sister (Jessica Campbell), who runs a "burn it all down" kind of campaign out of jealousy over a friend. There's some dark commentary here about how sexual desire can disrupt personal integrity, but I think the film erred in the construction of Witherspoon's character, which was unfortunate. Worth seeing though.
It's not that Broderick's character isn't pilloried either though, because he is. He goes from trying to teach the kids the difference between ethics and morality to cheating on his wife and throwing his own career away, which I loved about the film. Talk about a rigged election. And while it feels like we've seen this kind of plot before, the multiple narrators and Klein's character, who is so good-natured, buoy the film. I also liked the third candidate, his bi-curious sister (Jessica Campbell), who runs a "burn it all down" kind of campaign out of jealousy over a friend. There's some dark commentary here about how sexual desire can disrupt personal integrity, but I think the film erred in the construction of Witherspoon's character, which was unfortunate. Worth seeing though.