a review by M. Dale Prins
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The Spellers: Harry Altman, Ted Brigham, Neil Kadakia, Emily Stagg, Angela Arenivar, April Degideo, Nupur Lala, Ashley White
Think Films presents a documentary directed by Jeffrey Blitz.
Running time: 95 minutes. No MPAA rating (suitable for all).
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Spellbound, an Academy-Award nominated documentary from last year that’s now opening relatively wide, should be the centerpiece of our collective longing for reality entertainment. Rather than throwing 16 attractive people into the Amazon to backstab each other while, of course, wearing skimpy outfits, Spellbound takes the less manufactured approach: Profile eight intelligent middle schoolers — most good at a multiplicity of academic subjects — and throw them onto a stage with 200 other intelligent adolescents, where they fight fight fight until they fall victim to the misspelled letter. The National Spelling Bee, the subject of Spellbound, is so full of drama, pathos and humor that the idea of fabricating reality though faux millionaires and neverending talent competitions seems not only strange, but unnecessary: The unencumbered truth is interesting enough.
I was worried by the third child that Spellbound might have spread itself too thin, that perhaps it would have been better just to follow around one child’s journey for the whole of the film rather than eight shown at length. I was wrong. Most documentaries work best with very focused ideas, but the greatest strength of Spellbound is its matter-of-fact diversity of subjects. The participants do span races and religions, as one might expect, but more interestingly, the film also shows measureless differences in socioeconomic backgrounds (a family of illegal Mexican immigrants; an upper-class child with an au pair), parental interest (a mom who didn’t know the date of her son’s regional bee; a father who does statistical analyses of words used at prior national bees), participant interest (a Missouri boy who stumbled into winning at Regionals; a girl who studied words eight hours a day during the summer), and, frankly, the normality of the participants. (One child asks if the boom microphone used by the filmmakers is edible.) Spellbound implicitly argues that success in America — which the bee is a microcosm of — is too complex to be defined by any factor, be it hard work, economic background, nature, nurture or even luck. All that and more play a part, but none of those qualities by itself can predict achievement at a spelling bee or in life.
But who cares about that diversity spiel in the previous paragraph? You will not watch Spellbound because it captures the collection of backgrounds of today’s academically precocious youth. You will watch Spellbound because it is enormously entertaining. Director Jeffrey Blitz’s conceit for the film — spend the first half introducing the eight children individually, then spend the second half tossing them together into the National Spelling Bee — ensures that watching the children on-stage at Nationals, throwing out tentative final letters, is more fascinating than just watching the finals of the competition on ESPN. (Yes, the finals really are on ESPN). Further, for those of us relatively academically inclined, it’s amusing and a bit humbling when the child seemingly spells a word wrong and…”What? She spelled it right? It’s really spelled like that? I’m checking my Webster’s when I get home.”
Perhaps because I was not a terrific speller in my youth, or perhaps because my school days came during the transition from encyclopedias to the Internet, I wonder if Spellbound glosses over some of the major 21st Century issues with spelling bees. There’s the isolationism of long hours of studying lists of words, of course — along with the dubious educational advantage to doing such — but I also wonder about the anachronistic nature of a talent now immediately available to any average student with a word processor. For example, I don’t know how to spell the word “anachronistic,” but I typed in “anacronistic,” Microsoft Word underlined my incorrect spelling in red, I right clicked for a list of possible corrections, and no one would have known the wiser had I not written this sentence. But that’s peripheral to the enjoyment of Spellbound, which is never less than interesting, and never less than ingrosing. Uh, I mean “engrossing.”