Pros: Interesting characters, absorbing filmmaking- and it's all true.
Cons: Not visually distinguished, though it hardly matters.
The Bottom Line: A rare and fascinating portrait of intelligent, driven youngsters today, perfect for smart kids, or for anyone who used to be a smart kid.
The Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee is an American tradition that has lasted for over seventy years. In the competition, roughly 250 kids from all over the United States compete by spelling words aloud, and are eliminated when they spell a word incorrectly. The only speller to not misspell a word is declared the winner. I myself participated in spelling bee competitions in my younger days, and although I never made it to the national competition, I went as far as the regional championship my eighth grade year before being eliminated.
Now you may be asking, who needs to know how to spell every word in the English language? There are dictionaries and spell-checking programs to take care of misspelled words. And as many people sometimes forget, intelligence is hardly the same as knowledge- for example, to know the author of every book in the library makes little difference if you can’t coherently express your thoughts about any of them. Still, it follows that smart people are good at accumulating a great deal of knowledge, and this makes the National Spelling Bee like the World Series for smart kids. The only difference is that, instead of competing against each other, it’s the kid versus the dictionary.
Jeffrey Blitz’s documentary Spellbound follows the lives of eight kids as they prepare for, and then compete in, the 1999 National Bee. Blitz selected these participants out of the competitors from the previous year who did well and were eligible to compete again. Of this group, he selected eight students from all around the country, from different ethnic and social backgrounds, and who sometimes had little in common other than their strivings to win the National Bee. The film’s first half serves to introduce these participants.
Consider Emily, a girl from a Connecticut family, who has been to two previous National Bees, is a whiz at word origins, and knows what other spellers to watch out for. Or Ted, a lumbering, shy student from rural Missouri who is nonchalant about his spelling ability. Or Neil, a kid of Indian descent who lives in Orange County and who has practiced with his parents so exhaustively that he speed-spells many of the words on his practice list. Or Ashley, from the projects of Washington, D.C., who didn’t even receive a trophy for her regional win.
What’s most remarkable about the cross-section of kids is that, in the process of choosing subjects from a variety of races and economic strata out of a somewhat limited pool, Blitz managed to find some really interesting people. The most fascinating backstory is that of Angela, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her father, who speaks very little
English, works on a cattle ranch, and he and her mother are proud of their daughter, who for them embodies the reason they crossed the border in the first place. She’s their own little piece of the American Dream, so to speak.
I personally felt the most affection for Harry, a gawky, scrawny little guy who’s probably the closest the film gets to presenting a stereotypical nerd. I remember how I was at that age, skinny and awkward, talking too much, with a mouth full of metal, seemingly oblivious to how different he is from everyone else, and although the film doesn’t show us what his life is like at school, I didn’t have much trouble figuring it out. Harry is the kind of kid who no doubt gets picked on a lot and then gets out of town the first chance he gets, only to return at his ten-year reunion and marvel at the state of his former taunters. (Or at least, I hope so. But enough about me...)
As we meet the kids, we also see their families and communities. One of the small wonders of the spelling bee is how it encourages others to help the participants. Of the eight kids we see, six are from two-parent households, and even those raised by single parents still receive a great deal of support from them. A few of the parents offer mostly moral support, while others take an active role in the word-learning process (indeed, at times Neil’s parents seem to be more excited about the spelling bee than he is). April, the somewhat glum daughter of a working-class Pennsylvania couple, says that she practiced up to nine hours a day. The kids’ teachers are also helpful, and some of the schools even have pep rallies and post banners to congratulate their champion spellers. As we meet Nupur, an Indian-American from Florida, we also see her three main competitors in the local bee, laughing and joking about the words they missed.
The film’s second half takes place at the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. Here we meet the Bee’s longtime pronouncer, as well as the director of the event, who calls the National Bee “a piece of Americana.” We also encounter several former champions, including the first winner from 1925. But most of the time we’re watching the participants on stage as they each step up to the microphone, spell the word they’re given, and hope not to hear the dreaded bell that signifies a misspelling.
The most amazing thing about the scenes at the National Bee is how well we feel like we know the eight main kids. Blitz has made the film in a way so we like them and understand where they’re coming from, and as such we are rooting for each one as he or she stands center stage. Because the Bee can only have one champion, these scenes are just as much about how the kids react to their anxieties in competition, and their eliminations when they come (more often then not, their reaction seems to be “I’m kinda glad THAT’s over”). As we see each speller onstage, confronted with a word he may or may not know, trying to work it out in his mind, the film becomes hypnotic. As one of the kids says, “you can know every word except one, and that’ll be the one you’ll get.”
Blitz also handles the inevitable championship round in an interesting way. As we come down to the final two spellers, one of whom is a kid we’ve met already, the film tells us who the winner will be before he or she spells the final word correctly. So instead of milking cheap suspense from the spelling of the word, we as an audience share in the happiness and relief of the speller, who knows the word and spells it correctly and confidently.
It’s tempting to call the National Spelling Bee a symbol for a very American kind of striving, to be the best in one very specific field and to be seen on ESPN excelling in it. But that’s not what it means to its participants. To these kids, who are sometimes social outcasts for their intelligence, it gives them a chance to do what they’re good at and to be celebrated for it for a change. At a time when high school basketball players sign multi-million-dollar endorsement contracts before they’re even drafted by the pros, this kind of celebration of mental dexterity is downright refreshing.
Although Spellbound isn’t a great film in the visual sense (it’s shot on muddy digital video and often with a handheld camera), it nonetheless reveals Jeffrey Blitz as documentarian to watch. He found an interesting subject for a film, discovered the right people to appear onscreen, and above all told the story in a way that was an involving experience for the audience. My viewing of Spellbound was unique in that it produced an active audience response in a way few films I’ve seen have. During the competition scenes, I sometimes spelled the words to myself, and as I looked around me I saw others were doing the same. Funny, how the film takes eight specific kids and then finds a way to turn them into every one of us.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.