Matthew Broderick

Geoffrey Macnab does not stop at assessing Matthew Broderick's work in Alexander Payne's Election; he guesses at what playing it felt like. After squeaky-clean juvenile leads in films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, he writes, taking on a crumpled, slovenly man who keeps pornography in his basement must surely have been liberating. The guess rests on the earlier persona the writer has just named, and he keeps the hedge in his own words. Macnab counts off the humiliations the man suffers as well: spat at, his car smeared with mud, his eye stung by a bee. Jamie Graham, who dislikes a cartoon adaptation, separates out Broderick's work in it as admirably played.