This dazzling comedy mixes a wry, offhand allegory for the Nixon-Kennedy debate; a slice of small-town misery pitched right in the midway point between Updike and Preston Sturges; and a homespun update of Bunuel's SIMON OF THE DESERT, with a good-guy high-school teacher (Matthew Broderick) as Saint Simon and a pert, implacable, hard-shelled overachiever (Reese Witherspoon) as Satan.
The director and co-writer Alexander Payne has a ziggety, hotfooting but unstressed style that never misses its mark, and the performances are stunning. Broderick perfectly varnishes the hidden desire and rage inside a principled nobody; and Reese Witherspoon gives a great performance as a resentful, pit-bull-like go-getter whose button nose, narrowing eyes and helmetlike hair are like a turtle's carapace, blocking the world's aggressions.
This picture--probably the best-written comedy since BARTON FINK--is full of delights, like the rich, popular jock (usually a figure of terror or mockery in American movies) who turns out to be a flawlessly saintly sort of holy idiot. And Payne makes the fluorescent-lit classrooms, chain dining experiences and bit players look the way they look in life, not in dressed-up studio movies, without being strainedly "realistic." The picture combines intelligence with a rampaging, chaotic sense of fun in a way that seems mostly lost in contemporary film; the movie seems to have been beamed in from another era. It was bunglingly sold by Paramount and quickly squashed by the work of George Lucas; Alexander Payne, like his protagonist, like his mentor Bunuel's heroes, must by now have learned the hard way that nice guys finish last.
The director and co-writer Alexander Payne has a ziggety, hotfooting but unstressed style that never misses its mark, and the performances are stunning. Broderick perfectly varnishes the hidden desire and rage inside a principled nobody; and Reese Witherspoon gives a great performance as a resentful, pit-bull-like go-getter whose button nose, narrowing eyes and helmetlike hair are like a turtle's carapace, blocking the world's aggressions.
This picture--probably the best-written comedy since BARTON FINK--is full of delights, like the rich, popular jock (usually a figure of terror or mockery in American movies) who turns out to be a flawlessly saintly sort of holy idiot. And Payne makes the fluorescent-lit classrooms, chain dining experiences and bit players look the way they look in life, not in dressed-up studio movies, without being strainedly "realistic." The picture combines intelligence with a rampaging, chaotic sense of fun in a way that seems mostly lost in contemporary film; the movie seems to have been beamed in from another era. It was bunglingly sold by Paramount and quickly squashed by the work of George Lucas; Alexander Payne, like his protagonist, like his mentor Bunuel's heroes, must by now have learned the hard way that nice guys finish last.