Spellbound (2002)

DVD, Somerville, MA

April 25, 2007

* 1/2 / ****

Elementary school spelling bees are a pretty predictable affair. Put it on a national scale and you get exactly what you’d expect turned up to the nth level. That is, a few dozen genuine nerds, a handful of over-the-top eccentrics, a smattering of hard-driving parents, a sampling of adolescent ignorant arrogance, and a few well-adjusted and interesting real kids. Add ESPN’s rolling cameras and a national spelling championship to the equation and it’s kiddie reality TV of the most squirm-inducing kind.

Spellbound follows 8 middle school kids as they pursue the national spelling bee title. We travel with the filmmakers as they enter the competitors’ homes, gain insight into their intense training routines, meet their families, and learn how they arrived on the big stage of prepubescent spelling mastery. Why precisely these children pursue the strange hobby of memorizing the dictionary the movie never clearly identifies, though we can be sure in at least several cases parental pressure is unquestionably the most likely cause.

The students chosen for the documentary come from all over the country and are of varying races, classes, and ethnicities. Some are second-generation immigrants whose parents never learned English. Others have immigrant parents who have and say, in so many words, that their children must be the absolute best. Both sets of parents love America and speak highly of its opportunities but in very different and interesting ways. Other competitors include the daughter of a single black mom from D.C., a quiet, kind girl from Pennsylvania, a spastic motor-mouth from New Jersey, a hulking loner from the Midwest, and a few other kids whose task master parents drive them in different directions. In large part it’s a study of numerous stereotypes in the most obvious fashion.

The pay-off in Spellbound is the climactic national bee at the end of the film. Televised on ESPN it is amusing to see commentators, judges, and parents take things so over-the-top serious. Even more harrowing is watching the kids freeze, contort, or just plain panic when at a loss for letters, at times making us recall our own anxiety laden adolescent bouts performing in front of the masses. Unfortunately though, things gets stale rather quickly as we begin to wonder, “Why do we care how to spell “nepenthe” when it makes no sense to ever use it in any manner of speaking?” While the movie could have easily shown us reasons for the pursuit of something so trivial as spelling mastery (future wealth, fame, whatever!) it instead merely shows us children finding a temporary niche in their otherwise lonely worlds.

Kids who choose spelling as their adolescent hobby aren’t really the strangest or most intelligent of their lot, a notion very much at odds with what the movie (and many of the parents and kids, themselves) suggests. I’ve interacted with genius type people as well as Grade A loons and these kids aren’t really either. They’re introverted, for sure, and a bit strange and lonely but not nearly as far out on the spectrum as a viewer might hope for in such a movie.

Perhaps a better documentary would have focused on how strange kids develop so oddly from adolescence onward through their days living on their own. It might have required a bit more savvy and creativity to pull off but wouldn’t it make for a more interesting work than something so predictable and typical as eight kids and a spelling bee? I am surely in the minority here but the way I spell Spellbound is, “t-y-p-i-c-a-l-l-y b-o-r-i-n-g.”