High School High

Payne's style is almost as unadorned as his characters. He shoots the film in a fairly modest, unassuming manner, only sporadically letting loose some stylistic flourish -- freezing the frame, deploying a self-consciously crude joke or the occasional sight gag, making sure to tweak his characters into caricature only at certain strategic moments. Part of that is timing, but part of it is love -- like the best directors, he knows not to condescend to either his characters or his audience. (Or at least he's learned; in his first feature, Citizen Ruth, he was guilty of patronizing both.) If nobody seems very happy in Omaha, it isn't that the director is taking a native son's revenge, or tendering some comprehensive statement about life in America; it's just Payne making the point that life is fundamentally a droning tragedy whose acts are, in the best of circumstances, separated by moments of high and low comedy. The same, of course, could be said of politics and, lie as we might, sex. There's an undertow of melancholy in Election, a wistfulness that can sometimes be hard to discern amid all the shattered alliances, petty deceptions, hilarious one-liners and deep mischief. Everyone connected to the election -- except for Paul, the blissfully unenlightened innocent -- has something to lose, which is why they're so desperate to win. And while that sounds pretty American, really it's just human.

ELECTION | Directed by ALEXANDER PAYNE Written by PAYNE and JIM TAYLOR | Produced by ALBERT BERGER, RON YERXA, DAVID GALE and KEITH SAMPLES | Released by Paramount | At Cineplex Broadway, AMC Century 14 and Cineplex Showcase