My favourite Payne film is also one of his earliest and is what is often referred to in public and critical opinion as perhaps his best, depending on how much your personally prefer Sideways or not. 

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Election from the novel by Tom Perotta is a sublime and very straightforward adaptation of an already brilliant book, with enough flourishes and changes to make this already ingenious concept taken to another level, with a series of performances at Payne’s disposal to further to take this film to another level. The initial Perotta concept is so brilliant that it in many ways is fool-proof if done with any level of craft at all; having a high school election serve as a microcosm for modern political mania. It’s genius. Perotta was influenced chiefly by the outsider campaign of Ross Peroit, served here by the creation of rebel candidate Tammy Metzler and a stranger than fiction story of ballots being burned by the staff at a school as to avoid a pregnant teenage girl winning the homecoming queen crown that she was to be awarded. Place within the mania of these concepts a mid-life crisis case with a supposed star teacher and a fiercely competitive and driven young woman made for things far greater than school halls thwarted by her own knowledge that is the case, and you end up with the furiously brilliant film that Election is. This is Payne at his most kinetic when it comes to his film-making, with his screenplay and direction constantly moving narration to narration and utilising in its arsenal repeated freeze frames and artistic flourishes that make this a far more poppy and at times crude film than a lot of his later more sombre works. It’s also the sort of film that is easy to brandish as the “truest movie about politics” despite its structures, with Payne even commenting that Obama said it was his favourite “political movie” – a comment that in actuality I feel Obama has made about most TV and films of a political nature with a darker, more acerbic tonality. Above all else despite its dances with dark humour and crude subject matter, Election remains highly rewatchable and entirely entertaining, moving at an impeccable pace as the downfalls of our characters and their own separate implosions clash and build.

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Tracy Flick has gotten a bit off a reputation as a truly hate-able character, and although Witherspoon has her moments of pure villainy in this film, one cannot deny how Witherspoon leads us to understand where Tracy is coming from and why she is doing everything that she is doing. A perfect foil for Broderick and a perfect fit for this ingenious character. There are things that Broderick does in this film that are funnier than some things I have seen in all-out broad comedies. The dead pain brilliance of this film and Broderick’s performance leads me to wonder why we don’t see this vein of Broderick’s all the time. Mr McAllister is a bad guy, there’s no doubt about it, but god is he a pitiful one. He is so undeniably wimpy that we almost can’t help but feel bad for him. He even leads us to consider whether or not what he is doing is right, when it is so clearly, so very clearly wrong. The power of a great performance. However it cannot be understated what is brought to the film by the further ensemble, in particular a hilarious and so incredibly good-natured Chris Klein as Paul Metzler, the standard jock popularity candidate (perfect for fuelling Tracey’s fury) and Jessica Campbell as Tammy Metzler, offering up a great turn with a lot of heart behind her typical teenage anti-social and in many ways anti-government rebellions. But also with Phil Reeves who in a few scenes as a dry principal has multiple killer lines, or Colleen Camp who again with only a few spare moments offering perfect context for Tracey. The alternate ending of the film is a straight adaptation of the books more sombre and less comedic final punch – both work for me, however Perotta’s more sensitive conclusion on the page does not pair aswell with the final product of Payne’s snappier and more punchy conclusion after the film we’ve just watched. Overall however Election for me is a perfect film, equal parts funny, tender, truthful, painful, vulgar and sweet. With each character in our central head to head encompassing all six of those adjectives in a sensational concoction making two the great characters of that era and the centre of one of my personal favourite dark comedies of all time.

- Thomas Carruthers