Everybody thinks he's so nice. And he is nice. Of course he does, and the movie is complex enough to see that although he's its nominal hero, it's not much of a life. He has a loveless marriage with a doughy spouse whom he seems unable to stimulate, much less satisfy, and a transparent need to punish Tracy in the real world of the high school to pay her back for the sexual heat she inspires in him in the unreal world of his head. It sees through everybody.
Nothing impresses it.
It's got the best faces on screen in years. Seeing it is like standing in line to get the crusty macaroni and a milk or lemonade carton and still having no place to sit in the lunch hall, that cruelest of all arenas. Tracy and Mr. M take turns telling the story of the election in which they were essentially opponents, and both lie blandly to us as they speak, in clear contradiction to the behavior we witness on the screen. That realpolitik obtains here as well, as perky pretty perfect Tracy, with her foursquare bromides, stands for conservatism in its insipid claims to moral purity and higher patriotism, and Mr. M is liberalism, propelled into deviousness by its own notions of superiority, quite willing and able to subvert democracy to achieve its supposedly higher ends. It offers a pox on both their houses.