Among the strange non-sexual movie fetishes that I posses is a strange pleasure in watching documentaries about people who devote far too much time to the trivial and banal. In the last few years, I've really enjoyed Trekkies, Trekkies 2, Word Wors (Scrabble), and Cinemania (movies) among others, so I was really looking forward to seeing Wordplay, which is about crossword puzzle enthusiasts. Part of the appeal of these movies seeing how the obsessive integrate their hobbies into their lives (or fail to), and for a while, Wordplay seems to not be that interesting because- these people are kind of normal.
That may be because crossword puzzles require you to know a lot about a wide variety of topics, where the Scrabble players memorize words without their meanings or the Star Trek fans learn the call numbers of each and every Starfleet vessel. The crossword champs do call themselves nerds, but they mean it in the best sense of the word- they are smart and interesting, and successful at their careers. Among their occupations are: editor of a magazine, high-level project manager for Hewlett Packard, a student (presumably on a full-ride scholarship), and Broadway pianist. One writes puzzles himself for a living. All of the people seem to lack the crippling self-doubt and emotional problems many people in the others films posses.
The people are indeed interesting, but it takes so long for the movie to get to them! The first half consists of boring interviews with celebrity puzzlers and two of the most famous (relatively speaking) crossword constructors in the country: Will Shortz and Merl Reagle. Although it is interesting to watch Reagle describe how he writes a puzzle (it's harder than you might think), the first half gets tedious very quickly. The filmmakers must have felt they scored a major boon when the landed an interview with Bill Clinton, but there are far more interesting topics I would want to hear him talk about than going into the White House kitchen for fifteen minuets with his newspaper to "get away from it all." So what if a former President like's crossword puzzles? That doesn't make it interesting. It's not interesting when Jon Stewart, The Indigo Girls, Ken Burns or baseball player Mike Mussina talks about them either.
But then the contest starts, and there is real suspense, combined with a kind of warm and fuzzy feeling we rarely get from documentaries. Everyone at this contest, which is the only kind gathering for puzzle fans in the country, is so nice to each other. At one point, a player reports a scoring error to a judge- that will result in someone else winning. Instead of the desperate, dog-eat-dogs competitions, these people would like to win, but their world won't collapse if they lose (in fairness, this good humor may partially attributed to the fact that the grand prize is only $4000). Still, the final contest is really nail biting- we want all the contestants to win.
I'm giving this movie a limited recommendation because the first half is so strong, but it's too bad Creadon got starstruck and became distracted from their main subject. Still, I'd rather watch a film with a bad first half then a bad second.
Wordplay (2005)