Reese Witherspoon for president! Election, a comedy from a time when US politics was amusing

Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick in Election, ‘the kind of earnest try-hard you just want to see taken down a notch, or three’. Photograph: imagenet

Reese Witherspoon may have got her Oscar for Walk the Line but she has never been as iconic as she was in what should be considered the real highlight of her career: Election.

Alexander Payne’s spiky and smart 1999 movie is set at an average American high school in a town where the most defining characteristic is its banality. Nothing extraordinary is supposed to happen in Omaha, Nebraska and, in some ways, nothing did.