Spellbound

Spellbound tells the stories of eight teenagers as they seek glory at the 1999 National Spelling Bee championship. Glory, in this case, is fifteen minutes of fame on ESPN — that is, if they can spell ‘cabotinage’ and ‘opsimath.’ In one of these stories, we follow a young girl from Texas, whose father can’t speak English and may or may not be legal. In another story, there’s the white guy nerd from Missouri. In yet another, a 12-year-old son to Indian immigrants, living in California, who push their child to the point where he has almost all of the dictionary memorized. There’s also the black girl from Washington, D.C., whose mother appears to be single and says that her daughter hasn’t gotten enough props for her creds. Or something like that. So, while these are eight loose stories, they clearly tie together in a sentimental, N.P.R. kind of way. This, Spellbound tells us, is American diversity, and these are intelligent Americans.

Pardon us for waxing sacrilegious about an American tradition, but we don’t get spelling bees. The final rounds of the National Spelling Bee competition in 1999 were broadcast live on ESPN. In 2007 they were broadcast live on primetime network TV. The competition must draw in millions in ad revenue, so not only are spelling bees quaint high school competitions, they’re big business at the national level. But why spelling bees, we wonder? As one father says in Spellbound, a child works hard to memorize thousands of words that no one ever uses. Plus, aside from the apparent uselessness of memorizing “heleoplankton” and “apocope,” Americans also have a proud tradition of being poor spellers. George Washington wasn’t so great at it, though there were no grammar police in his day to regulate the art of spelling. Lewis and Clark were absolutely horrendous. Noah Webster concocted alternate spellings for numerous words, in order to make American spelling different from British. So it seems okay to us to be a little off once in awhile. Why not create a different bee, one more useful for the young ones later in life? Why not a biology bee? A history bee? Memorizing the names of and dates associated with Roman emperors and ancient empires sounds more valuable to us. Or, if these eight teenagers are going to study words all day long, they should just learn two or three foreign languages instead of the spellings of exotic words.

Spellbound is cute, no doubt. Some of these people will charm you, and some of the things they say will make you chuckle. Of course the camera, put right in their face constantly, demands that they talk and talk about themselves. Mothers of spelling bees contestants talk about how they feel. Fathers brag about their children. The children talk about themselves. For this narcissist fest we partly blame the interviewees and partly blame the filmmakers.

Because it tracks several contestants before and during the competition and because of its presentation, Spellbound is not unlike other documentaries about novel competitions; to name a few, Wordplay (crossword puzzles), Word Wars (Scrabble), and The King of Kong (arcade version of Donkey Kong). They all film quirky contestants who obsessively play a game familiar to us all, most of whom normal society would label nerds or freaks. This is the beginning of a genre. Should we call it Docugamery? Gamumentary? Sounds like we’ve created another word to add to the competition.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 5
Morality: 7