Reese Witherspoon and Alexander Payne, Your Reunion Film Has Just Become a Paperback!

  

Reese Witherspoon burst on the scene in the exceptional The Man in the Moon when she was just fourteen. She then spent the next seven years mostly in the kind of films that were unworthy of her, occasionally showing her brilliance is smaller films like Freeway and Pleasantville that were overshadowed by her work in more superficial movies such as Fear and Cruel Intentions.  Then in 1999, she played Tracy Flick in the incredible comedy Election and she has never truly looked  back.

The character of Tracy was unlike any teenage character at the center of a movie of the 1990s and few since.  Tracy was the ultimate overachiever, determined to walk over anybody to get what she wanted. In the battle for class president one of her teachers, angry at her (I’ll get to why below because in the last quarter-century, our way of looking at it has changed) ran the high school quarterback against her and ended up sabotaging the election to defeat her before it all came unraveled.

Witherspoon received the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Actress, beating out among others Hilary Swank, who was dominating the awards for her eventual Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry. Witherspoon received her first Golden Globe nomination but to the shock of many she was ignored for Best Actress. That would be rectified five years later when she deservedly took home every award in the book – including an Oscar – for her performance as June Carter Cash in Walk The Line.

Election was also a landmark film because it launched to the stratosphere the career of one of the most extraordinary writer-directors of the 21^st century Alexander Payne. Payne had received high praise for his first film Citizen Ruth, a movie where the title character, a pregnant glue sniffer (an incredible Laura Dern) becomes the center of both the pro-choice and pro-life movements to make her the center of their cause. A satire that was clearly a quarter of a century ahead of its time, the film was more or less ignored by awards shows in an already crowded year for independent films.

Such would not be the case for Election.  Both Witherspoon and Payne’s screenplay (co-written with Jim Taylor) would walk the critics circles. The screenplay took several prizes, including the New York Film Critics.  But its finest hour came at the Independent Spirit Awards where it took the prize for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. (Witherspoon was nominated for Best Female Lead but ending up losing to Hilary Swank. No argument there.)

With the exception of Aaron Sorkin, Payne has become one of the most awarded screenwriters in the history of film.  While he did occasionally debase himself by writing movies such as Jurassic Park III and the very badly done I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry the films that he has written and directed are among the greatest of the 21^st century, almost all of them in the independent film world, all of them impossible to define as genre, sometimes even to the actors in them.  The next four movies he wrote or director were divided evenly between drama and comedy at the Golden Globes (About Schmidt and The Descendants in the former; Sideways and Nebraska in the latter) but all of them have such a mood of underlying despair beneath the humor that they don’t seem to belong in either.

However having seen all four movies, I am certain that they all masterpieces, something that the world has agreed to as well.  Payne has shared in two Oscars for screenwriting (for Sideways and The Descendants) and has been nominated for direction three times (the previous two films and Nebraska) With the exception of About Schmidt, which was not considered an Independent film, he has also won multiple awards from the Spirit Awards, taking another directors prize for Sideways and two more writing awards for both Sideways and The Descendants.  Collectively he has won over seventy awards for writing from various critics organizations. Curiously enough, even though he won several awards for About Schmidt, including the Golden Globe, it is the only one of his films that did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay even though it was one of the most profoundly emotional films of 2002 and featured one of Jack Nicholson’s last truly magnificent performances. He takes his time between projects: there was a seven year gap between Sideways and Descendants a four year gap between Nebraska and Downsizing (a rare critical failure for him at the time) and it is only now we are going to get another film from him The Holdovers due to be released later this year.

The film was an adaption of a brilliant short novel by Tom Perrotta, and in a way it helped launch him to more popular success.  Todd Field’s extraordinary adaptation of Little Children received three Oscar nominations (I’ve raved about it myself at this column) and while Perrotta mostly wrote novels for several years, in 2014 he would adapt and executive produce his best-selling The Leftovers for HBO with Damon Lindelof. The series is justifiably considered one of the masterpieces of the 2010s. He then adapted another of his short-novels Mrs. Fletcher to HBO with Kathryn Hahn in the title role. I thought it was a minor masterpiece though few agreed with me.

Essentially all three of the extraordinary creative forces had their careers in Hollywood launched with election. Was Perrotta thinking of that when he decided to write a sequel for the first time in his long career? I don’t know and I don’t particularly care. Because last month I finally got around to reading Tracy Flick Can’t Win, his sequel to Election and if there was ever a property crying out for a movie adaptation and a reunion of these great forces, I don’t know what else would.

I basically devoured the novel over the course of a weekend. It would not have been difficult to do so even if I were a slower reader: the novel is 257 pages long. (Perrotta has never been one to believe in padding). But this is one of those novels that you are sorry that its such a quick read because, like with Perrotta’s work, you want to savor it.

Would Mr. McCallister be upset or amused to learn that Tracy Flick’s ambition basically never went anywhere? It’s a moot point; McCallister doesn’t show up in the novel and is barely mentioned.  But the novel does take a closer look at Tracy and we find a basic truth: her teenage years, which were clearly lonely in the book and movie, have led to an equally empty adulthood.

It wouldn’t surprise anyone that yes, Tracy did want to be President someday. But as you might expect, life got in the way and in the worst way possible. Tracy was in her first year of law school when her mother (who we barely see in the book or film)’s health began to deteriorate. She has sacrificed everything to get Tracy to the finish line and had been hiding it to keep it that way, but it became too much. Tracy had to drop out of law school to take care of her mother. She worked in a series of dead end jobs before she ended up becoming a substitute teacher and now, in a grim irony, is the assistant principal at her old high school. At this point, her only ambition she thinks she can realize is to become principal.

In the film version of Election, McCallister’s rage against Tracy was precipitated by the fact a colleague of his had an ‘affair’ with Tracy, her mother found out about it, and he lost his job. Even before the sequel came out, critics have realized the villainy of McCallister and the fact that Tracy, who was only fifteen when the relationship began, could not consent and was essentially molested.  One of the characters in this novel is the principal Jack Weede, and when you hear how he tells the story what is remarkable is that anyone lost their job the first time. Based on what we read in the novel to horrified ears, is that relationships between students and teachers were the norm  in Green Meadow. Jack talks about it fondly, says he never had an affair with a student and one sentence later tells us about an affair he had with one after she turned eighteen. McCallister no doubt knew this kind of thing was going on at his school; his anger was probably more than this time it hurt a friend.

The overarching message throughout Tracy Flick is a decision to look backwards. Tracy has found out very hard that Green Meadow has no interest in changing to the future. We hear of a measure to build a more advanced high school that failed despite all of the problems with the building that everybody is aware of.  The head of the school board, who is a vital character, became a tech millionaire and has returned to come back to his hometown. He is ultimately superficial but it is worth noting he and his ideas are regarded with the same brutal dismay as any improvement Tracy wants. He floats the idea of a Hall of Fame for the school, and the only candidate anyone can agree on belongs is Vito Falcone, who was the most successful athlete in Green Meadow history. By success, he was drafted by the Dolphins and ultimately played four games in the NFL.

Tracy is regarded with the same disdain as an adult as she is as a teenager.  Tracy learns the hard way that all of her myriad accomplishments in high school – all of the things that annoyed McCallister  - mean nothing compared to playing on a truly mediocre sports team.  Tracy is continuously admonished, more than anything else, because she never liked football something that every other authority figure worships and cares about more than improving the computer lab or test scores.

Now Tracy may be feeling bitterness about nearly losing the high school presidency to the ex-head of the football team, but as we see she has a valid point. Much of the novel involves looking at the life of Vito, the high school football star everybody has worshipped because of what he means. Vito is an alcoholic, has had two failed marriages, abused one of his wives and is suffering from brain damage. Throughout his backstory we learn that he was allowed to get away with murder as a child: he got two girlfriends pregnant and did nothing to speak up for a teammate of his whose life was destroyed because of a police incident that Vito himself was in part responsible for and was a bully throughout his time at school.  When Vito eventually returns to Green Meadow, no one really cares about Vito now, all they care about is what he represents.

I’ve revealed as much about the book as I’m going to for this piece; this will not be a review in the sense of most of my  book reviews. The reason it’s clear Tracy Flick Can’t Win needs to be filmed (or turned into a limited series; Perrotta did just as well with that with Mrs. Fletcher) is because its clearly just an important story as Election was.  The novel has the same themes that Election did – rampant sexism,  homophobia, grooming – and even more relevant storylines. The idea of racism, the desire to look back to the past rather than the future, the idea that the world is a meritocracy when is not, that the truly mediocre need more helped because the intellectually gifted will be fine, and the way our worship of idols glosses over who they actually were and are.

Reese Witherspoon has spent much of the last decade either helping produce adaptions of novels into brilliant limited series that feature her in a key role (Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere) and creating a book club where she recommends novels that the world might otherwise ignore (Where the Crawdads Sing). I realize that you’re very  busy right now, Reese, but seriously, this a story with a character that was literally written for you to play. Do the world a favor and option Tracy Flick Can’t Win already.  There doesn’t seem to be a character for Nicole Kidman to play, but there are a couple that Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern  would be great for. I bet Alexander Payne would love to work with them again to