Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I haven’t seen this movie. That’s a common refrain for me these days. I’ve missed a lot of cool screenings, and it drives me crazy. Perfectly lovely publicists end up with their feelings hurt because my schedule changes at the last moment, and I end up missing things, and in the end, I feel bad. We’re way into March and it feels like I’ve seen almost nothing this year.
Beaks has been telling me how good this film is for a while now, and I finally convinced him to stop telling me and to tell you instead. Check it out:
SPELLBOUND (d. Jeffrey Blitz)
Mine was “illusion”.
There’s a moment in Jeffrey Blitz’s wonderful, Academy Award-nominated documentary, SPELLBOUND, in which a National Spelling Bee finalist names the words that she “hates”; i.e., the words that sent her packing from previous competitions. As she lists the vilified verbiage, she finishes by allowing that, soon enough, there’s going to be another word joining her vocabulary enemies list. And though I laughed along with her as she made this admission, I cringed ever so slightly as that word, “illusion”, flashed forward from some repressed memory of past disappointment. Was I really recalling that moment at Kenwood Elementary when I overconfidently rattled off the letters that comprise that damnable noun sans that all-important second “l”; thus, missing my chance to move onto the regional finals of the Ohio Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee.
Please, don’t weep openly on my account. As sure as kids are remarkably resilient, I managed to bounce back from that Fourth Grade setback – going on to land the lead in our school production of The Velveteen Rabbit, if you must know – but that experience nonetheless lingers in my memory, as it will writ large for seven of the eight children profiled in Blitz’s film. For their time will come with the drama-starved leer of the national press upon them, and, for a lucky few, the added pressure of being aired live across the country on ESPN.
Before reaching that fateful broadcast, however, we are introduced to the children individually as they prepare for their odyssey to Washington D.C. Wisely, Blitz has chosen to focus on families from vastly different social strata, resulting in a cross-section that runs from upper- to lower-class America. And while parental philosophies certainly differ as we move from one subject to another, only once is there a sense of a parent pushing too hard, and, perhaps, desiring the crown more than the child.
In many cases, however, it’s the child who’s running the risk of being overly obsessed with so seemingly trivial an endeavor. Consider April DeGideo, a tremendously driven young girl from a tiny Pennsylvania hamlet, who devoted eight to nine hours a day over her summer vacation to studying and memorizing words some of us may never hear uttered in our lifetime. Of course, April cuts back her study time to maybe four hours once school is back in session, though one of her teachers expresses an odd mixture of admiration and dismay when talking about how, during any kind of downtime, she’ll pull out index cards marked over with words she’s yet to commit to memory.
April’s zeal is in marked contrast to the shy, unassuming demeanor of Ted Brigham, a tall, thickly-built adolescent who’s something of an outcast at his rural Missouri school. Everyone, including Ted, seems genuinely surprised at his achievement in the regional Spelling Bee. The same can be said of Angela Arenivar, a young Texan whose spelling success is even more remarkable considering that her father, a Mexican Immigrant, can’t speak a word of English. Living with her family on a ranch owned by a casually racist geriatric and his snippy wife (i.e., she’s quick to temper in the interview segment presented here), Angela’s situation is possibly the most complex in the film. In fact, her story, so rife with issues of race and nationality, could very well be the focus of an entire film itself. But in the context of the story Blitz is telling, there simply isn’t room for a substantial exploration of these theme; ergo, he largely refrains from broaching them at all, leaving us to draw our own unsettling conclusions as we briefly view employer and employee touring the nation’s capital together.
Undoubtedly, the child who leaves the most lasting impression is Harry Altman. Overburdened with a number of amusing idiosyncrasies – all of which are topped off by a classic nerd guffaw worth of Robert Carradine – Harry’s the kind of kid that, if he’s lucky enough to survive high school, will end up putting a man on Mars. In the meantime, he’s so utterly unselfconscious as he works through the spelling of “cephalagia” (a word, I must note, that my Microsoft Word spell check does not even recognize), gesticulating like a madman and running through more bizarre facial contortions than Jim Carrey’s displayed throughout his entire career, that it’s a testament to Blitz’s restraint as a filmmaker that he doesn’t mine Harry for more laughs than he does.
Finally, the film ends up in Washington, D.C. for the finals, where the contestants’ anxiety translates palpably to the viewer. Though we might not be enamored of the adults involved (the father of Neil Kadakia, with his eight-point method to spelling, is particularly overbearing, and probably a bit self-serving), the kids are each outstanding individuals in their own right. And though they struggle gallantly to contain their emotions, the heartbreak reads powerfully as they each arrive at that word with which they’ll share an adversarial relationship for the rest of their lives. As they exit the competition one-by-one, we’re left asking ourselves not only how they’ll cope with the disappointment, but where they’ll go from here. I found myself worrying about a few of the kids, but ample comfort is found by Blitz on the joyous faces of the parents marveling at their child’s nascent ability to think and problem solve.
Unlike many tales of youth, so caught up in unremitting despair, SPELLBOUND is a film offering a bit of wholly earned optimism. Too often we forget that there is triumph in childhood – moments of transcendence and deliverance. It’s these moments that remind us the future of our country isn’t so dark after all, and need not be an illusion.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
Awesome, man. Keep an eye out for this one in limited release and at this year’s Academy Awards, where it’s going head to head with the hype-heavy BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE for Best Documentary.
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