DVD of the Week: Frontrunners

Watching the tears of joy stream down the two-million-plus cheeks in attendance of this morning's historical inauguration, my thoughts kept creeping back to Caroline Suh's largely vérité pop-doc Frontrunners, in which four NYC teenagers campaign in a student union presidential race where "race is a factor." President Obama may present the face of post-racial U.S. politics, but at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, where the competition is so fierce that only the top 3% of its 25,000 applicants are accepted as students*, cultural diversity has long been an asset to winning the presidency. It's a known fact that over half the school's population is of Asian descent, so running mates are sometimes specifically chosen for not being Caucasian. Are the leaders of tomorrow being progressive or merely learning to pander at an early age? The prescience of Frontrunners may be the happy accident of being released in this transitional era, but watching how votes are drummed up by unpolished candidates -- each craftier than your average kid, but all still lacking the confidence and maturity of adulthood, especially on-camera -- the dynamics of electioneering have never seemed so briskly entertaining. (Especially when set to a hip indie soundtrack featuring Elf Power, The M's and Of Montreal. Nicely curated, Mr. Tully).

How important is the role of a student government? As the opening sequence answers, managing a $100,000 budget may be the biggest responsibility for one of these teenagers, so it's certainly more than planning proms. George -- an eccentric Max Fischer wannabe who speaks in five-dollar words and has his own curtained hallway lounge set up for meetings -- would like to re-invest said money, one of the few proposals ever mentioned. These are still kids, so their issues are typically less important than their past experience, debating proficiency, and of course, personality. If the portraiture is light (Mike is the cocky one, Hannah the over-ambitious Tracy Flick type who once co-starred in a Todd Solondz picture, and Alex the characterless underdog who his classmates mostly recognize for being tall), it's only because the Stuyvesant kids aren't voting on the leader of the Western world; the stakes are much lower in what could be seen as a popularity contest. That's the platform that the film runs on: whether one gains the support of the media (the school newspaper actually endorses someone; those poor fragile young egos!) or comes across as a slick-dick manipulator instead of a candidate of the people, every election still comes down to that one question: With whom would you rather drink a beer... er, Coca-Cola?

* Stuyvesant is alma mater to four Nobel laureates, Oscar-winning director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Obama's senior campaign manager David Axelrod, and the Beastie Boys' original drummer Kate Schellenbach (which might partly explain Oscilloscope's interest in the film).

Posted by ahillis at January 20, 2009 1:29 PM