Three features and a student short make for a slender retrospective, but the range of Alexander Payne’s decade-long career, which is being celebrated in the Harvard Film Archive series "Alexander Payne: American Allegories" this weekend, is as broad as the Nebraska prairie that is his exclusive setting.

Broad, too, as a pie in the face. Payne is probably American cinema’s foremost satirist, but sometimes the skewers are more like meat cleavers. That’s the literal truth in his new About Schmidt (2002; November 29 at 7 p.m.). Adapted (in name only — it’s completely different) from the Louis Begley novel, it opens with a retirement dinner at an Omaha steakhouse for insurance executive Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson, in a role that reprises all his roles). Payne cuts to a photo of a prize bull on the wall, then to a photo of a bovine Schmidt on an easel, then to Schmidt in the flesh hovering dyspeptically over the untasted meat on his plate. Schmidt is the closest Payne has gotten to a road movie (none of his other features strays far from the Omaha city limits) and a tearjerker, as the newly widowed Schmidt travels in a Winnebago to Denver to visit his daughter, who’s about to marry a buffoon. At the end of the road, caustic laughter curdles into purging grief.

In a moment of reflection, Schmidt concludes that life is meaningless, all efforts futile. Not much change there from Payne’s first film, "The Passion of Martin" (1991; November 30 at 7 p.m. and December 1 at 7 p.m.), a student short he made at UCLA. Here the nihilism expressed by Schmidt at the end of his life starts in utero (as seen in a crude but very funny flashback) for the title hero. Martin is a nasty-minded young photographer whose not-so-quiet desperation gets only worse when he meets the love of his life. The director’s fledgling sensibility here lies between the poignant and the puerile, and his comic and narrative skills are both brutish and deft.

Payne doesn’t ease up much on the weltschmerz in his feature debut, the Orson Wellesian-titled Citizen Ruth (1996; November 30 at 8 p.m.), a blunt but ambiguous black comedy about abortion. Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern, whose mugging and pratfalls evoke Stan Laurel) is not ambitious; her idea of success is passing out in a parking lot from huffing paint or glue. But occasionally she has to take up with "some guy" or other to pay for trips to the hardware store, and the exchanges have left her with four kids, all taken up by the state. A fifth is on the way. A judge offers her a choice: have an abortion or do time.

So much for a woman’s right to choose. Word gets out about the deal, and Ruth becomes a prize bandied between pro- and anti-abortion-rights groups, both of which Payne sketches in wicked but still sympathetic caricatures. Although Ruth will infuriate those who want to see their partisan positions satisfied, those who respect art for its transcendence, humanity, and sense of humor will be pleased. In the end, the outrageously irresponsible and totally selfish Ruth is the only one who seems sane.

What keeps Payne’s characters from becoming mere cartoons is his astute detail and dialogue, which he draws with hilarious, heartbreaking accuracy from the banality of everyday life. Neither is his satire, though often broad, black-and-white; it relishes all human foibles. Such is the case in his most ambitious film, Election (1999; December 1 at 8 p.m.), which is adapted from the novel by Tom Perrotta.

Four points of view collide in a suburban Omaha high school, each with an unreliable voiceover narrator relating his or her side of "one of those stories people e-mail to each other." Dedicated teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick in his best performance) doesn’t want zealous senior Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon, ditto), the opposite of Ruth Stoops in all but her utter selfishness, to become president of the student government. Partly it’s because he has fantasies of her shouting "Fuck me Mr. M!" as he dutifully tries to get his wife pregnant. He insists, though, that he’s opposing Tracy because her ruthless ambition, if unchecked, will bring untold woe into the world.

So he encourages popular jock Paul Metzler (a sweetly fatuous, pre–American Pie Chris Stein) to run against her. Unfortunately, though politics on this or any level might be simple-minded, it is never simple, and further sexual guilt and jealousy compel a third candidate, Paul’s nihilist lesbian sister, Tammy (Jessica Campbell), to enter the fray. Anarchy ensues, sexual and otherwise; it all climaxes in one of the most hilarious, and painful, bee stings in movie history. Unlike others in recent history, this Election is thoroughly democratic — everyone gets screwed.