This film was put on my watch list based on the strength of how much we liked the other works by director Alexander Payne that we’ve seen. It’s true that his best is probably still the one that we first watched, Sideways, but all of them have been solid dramas about human relationships. So it’s by pure coincidence that this film turned out to be especially relevant in a year in which Hillary Clinton has just been nominated as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Presidential elections.
Tracy Flick is an overachieving student in high school who believes that she is headed for great things. Not only does she have fantastic grades by dint of hard work but she also makes it a point to be involved in many school activities as possible especially if she is able to be put into positions of authority on these committees. This rubs history teacher Jim McAllister the wrong way as he finds her insufferable and suspects that she will end up trampling on all of the little people on her way to the top. He is also irked that an affair between her and his best friend and fellow teacher led to the latter being fired and divorced while Tracy’s reputation remained intact. That’s why when she is due to win the position of student council president unopposed, he arranges for popular football player Paul Metzler to run against her. This sets off a cascade of other effects such as Paul’s sister, Tammy, running as a spoiler candidate to get back at her brother. Plus to top it all off, it appears that McAllister’s marital life isn’t altogether satisfactory.
As is usual with Payne, this film has a pleasant, feel-good element that makes it highly appealing without falling too far into sappy sentimentalism. I originally expected this to be fairly standard high school movie but it’s as much about McAllister as the students and as such is more interesting than I thought it would be. In between McAllister’s wandering eye, even if he doesn’t quite admit it to himself, Tammy’s homosexuality and the politics of the student body, there are plenty of balls to juggle and Payne does a great job at keeping them in the air. It does feel a bit too trite such that this shouldn’t be a considered a serious film. I could see the all too convenient twist with the janitor coming a mile away. But by and large, it’s not too bad and this is great entertainment.
Where it goes wrong is what it reveals about the director’s attitudes. The film’s stance about McAllister is ambiguous. His is the narrating voice and so we’re naturally drawn to see things from his point of view. But it quickly becomes obvious to the audience that his narration isn’t exactly impartial. He introduces himself as a well-liked and respected teacher and that he would love nothing more than to spend his life teaching. Yet a good teacher wouldn’t do the things that he does in this story and judging by how he treats his wife, it isn’t clear that he’s a good person either. He does justly get punished for his misdeeds but the film doesn’t exactly give him a hard landing either.
As for Tracy, McAllister finds her obnoxious and feels the need to take her down the peg. It seems to me that the film wants us to agree but it isn’t exactly clear to me why we should. Yes, it does appear that she doesn’t have much in the way of friends but at the same time it doesn’t seem as if anyone other than McAllister actually hates her or that she has actually harmed anyone. So she’s ambitious, she works hard and she expects that these qualities will get her ahead in life. Why is she wrong to want these things? The closest thing to a good guy in this film is Paul. He’s affable, popular and genuinely means well for others. On the other hand, he’s also something of a doofus and lacks motivation. Tracy even correctly observes that he comes from a rich family and never had to work hard for his popularity while she was raised by a single working mother and has to ride the bus to and from school.
This strongly reminds me of popular attitudes towards Hillary Clinton. Clinton is an incredibly unpopular politician in the United States and many commentators have tried to explain why. I think that at least part of the explanation is that Clinton is a woman who is extremely ambitious and has always been so. She is seen as a serious person who expects to get things done her way and doesn’t win over the hearts of people. She tries too hard instead of affecting the popular Internet attitude of not caring about anything so that you can never be accused to being “butthurt”. In the same way, when Tracy is trying to study in her room at college and the people outside are partying it up, I think it is asinine that the film implies that it is Tracy who is the problem rather than the party goers. I don’t know if there is a deliberately misogynistic element in this portrayal or if it is just coincidental but the optics here are horrible as the film is certainly trying to push Tracy as a shrill and bossy girl.
Payne apparently once commented that this is Barack Obama’s favorite political film and perhaps this is because it can seen as a realistic if tragic portrayal of how elections work. The film equivalent of Donald Trump here would of course be Tammy Metzler who campaigns on the premise on destroying the entire system if she is elected. Here, this platform can be somewhat justified in that it genuinely doesn’t matter except to the candidates who actually becomes president as the students don’t have any kpower anyway. But woe betide the world if this is applied to elections for positions of real power.