Word Wars

We’ve noted before the emerging movie genre we’ve labeled game-umentaries. Word Wars, a movie about four contestants in the 2002 National Scrabble Tournament, is the best of them, which is really not saying much.

Now competitive Scrabble itself is not exciting at all, but as Word Wars tries to demonstrate, the world of Scrabble tournaments is pretty interesting because it is full of quirky nerds. For instance, there’s Joe Edley, who’s won the national championship several times. He’s been a high-level Scrabble player for two decades, but he constantly annoys his opponents by playing psychological games during competition. Yet on camera Edley tries to project a humble image. He practices tai chi and mumbles over and over again, in New Age speak, that competitions mean nothing to him.

All of Edley’s opponents are after him. The weirdest is “G.I.” Joel Sherman, a dead ringer for Pee Wee Herman, who gets his nickname because of his constant acid reflux problem. Sherman, like the other professional Scrabble players we meet, does not work. He studies Scrabble five hours a day and gambles with fellow players. It’s never clear how any of these Scrabble pros earn a living. The tournament prizes are not even a month’s normal wage, and even if one won the national tournament, he’d only get $25,000.

The four contestants followed in Word Wars interact in complex ways. They are at once friendly, competitive, and distrustful of one another. They oftentimes surprise. Sherman, who we’d all judge to be talentless at first glance, is a fine piano player and singer. And Marlon Hill, a pottymouth and proud pot smoker from the Baltimore ghetto, who complains that the English language oppresses him and oppressed his ancestors, came in 2nd at the 1996 national tournament. There is a reason they surprise us: they are exceptionally lazy. Three of the four characters do not have jobs. They are all extraordinarily smart, and they are all clearly wasting their God-given mental abilities.

Word Wars‘ main point is that the Scrabble tournament world, far from being filled with boring nerds, contains diverse personalities, hierarchies, rivalries, expectations–in short, nothing different from the mini-worlds that we know and interact in. Its attempt to construct complex, sympathetic characters is the means by which it draws viewers into this world. We are supposed to sympathize, and thus better understand what being “human” means. For secularist critics, Word Wars succeeds at this.

But let’s not kid ourselves. This is Word Wars, not Hamlet. “G.I.” Joel Sherman is not Hamlet, and a hotel conference room in San Diego is not the kingdom of Denmark. We are dealing with Scrabble, and so the cares of this tournament world are extraordinarily petty. This point is all we could dwell on at the end the movie, and so our final question was, “Was the hour and twenty minutes we spent watching this movie worth it?”

If this short review gives you a reason to do better things, then maybe.

Entertainment: 7
Intelligence: 3
Morality: It depends. (a lot of foul language from one particular character though; should be rated R)