Spellbound
Programme Notes

Dir: Jeff Blitz 2002 US 1hr 38mins Documentary

Spellbound follows eight teenagers on their quest to win the 1999 National Spelling Bee.

Now it can be told: there are three ways out of the ghetto in modern America: sports, showbiz - and spelling. This hilarious and often unwatchably tense documentary is about America's 1999 national spelling competition, or "bee", in which kids compete for the title of America's top speller through school competitions, regional heats and finally the nailbiting national showdown in Washington DC.

Bright kids from the right side of the tracks go head to head with poorer ones and second-generation ethnic youngsters for whom the spelling bee represents the acme of their parents' study-hard work ethic. Children as young as 12 spell gasp-inducingly long and obscure words. Cephalalgia! Pococurante! Prospicience! Succedaneum! The finals are televised on the ESPN cable sports channel and the triumphant mini-brainiac gets to be a 15-minute celebrity. It's an orthographic Junior Miss Congeniality Pageant for boys and girls alike.

Or maybe it's Hoop Dreams for the nerds at the front of the class. Because what makes the spelling bee so fascinating is that it really is a sporting competition, simple enough in essence to attract all comers - a times-table contest wouldn't be half so riveting - but tricky enough, and infuriating enough, to trip up the brightest and best.

But the spelling bee rewards a fanaticism and single-mindedness which has nothing to do with increasing your word-power in any accepted sense. The spelling-whiz girls look fairly normal, but many of the boys exhibit tendencies which are borderline autistic and, in the case of one heartbreakingly sweet and hyperactive little kid called Harry, verging on Tourette's. He grimaces; he twitches; he squeaks; he squawks - and by golly, he spells.

The American spelling-bee phenomenon may baffle people here, though British audiences of a certain generation will remember Charlie Brown in Peanuts catastrophically going in for a spelling bee. As one British-born dad wonderingly comments, Europeans aren't as competitive. It is interestingly old-fashioned and severe: the loser is brutally dismissed with a little bell for the smallest slip. In an America timidly obsessed with political correctness, you half-expect a Special Olympics for dyslexics.

So does Blitz's movie endorse the spelling bee as a glorious democratic competition and symbol of self-betterment? Or is it just bizarre, dysfunctional and sad? I think Blitz hedges his bets with a pusillanimous neutrality: the absurdity is plain to see, but the movie ends on a high note of victory with the organisers resoundingly thanked in the credits. Either way, it's a riveting watch. I shall now, erm, run my computer spell-check through this review.

The traditional documentary used to be about important subjects - the building of dams, the migration of tribes, the hard lives of fishing folk in remote places, usually with portentous, poetic commentaries imposing the makers' views on the material. Then some 40-odd years ago, the lightweight camera brought us cinéma vérité and the patient, non-judgmental observation of people, often over long periods, frequently involved in activities that, on the face of it, were not especially significant. A splendid example of this kind of documentary is Spellbound, which arose out of its director, Jeff Blitz, watching the finals of the National Spelling Bee on TV from Washington DC in 1997.

Blitz was fascinated by seeing these kids in their early teens or younger taking part in a cruel and gruelling competition which offers no second chances. Get one letter wrong, the bell rings and you're finished. So he and some associates conducted research to see who some of the likely finalists might be in the 1999 contest. The cooperation of the competitors' families was secured and the film follows eight of them from their regional finals to the two-day event at a Washington hotel, the second day of which is televised across the nation. The result is a riveting and revealing look at the motives and backgrounds of a diverse group of young people, and their parents. From the Texas panhandle comes Angela, the 14-year-old daughter of a Mexican wetback who crossed the Rio Grande to make a better life for his family working as a farm hand and never learnt English. April, from a town in the Pennsylvanian rustbelt, has a father who lost his factory job and works part-time as a bartender. She affectionately compares her parents to Edith and Archie Bunker. The little black girl, Ashley, lives in a Washington DC housing project with her single mother and two sisters. From opposite coasts come Neil and Nupur, the children of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, settled respectively in San Clemente, California, and Tampa Bay, Florida, and deeply committed to the American Way.

What the movie is about is chasing the American Dream, getting ahead, improving your position in society, becoming somebody in a society that appears to offer infinite promise. The implications of the kids' involvement are nothing like as make-or-break as the chance of getting out of the black ghetto through basketball skills in a comparable documentary, Hoop Dreams . And the parents, though determined (Neil from San Clemente, for instance, goes through thousands of words a day with his dad and has Latin, French and German coaching), are far removed from the obsessive folk who push their kids in sports or show business. The film is also very funny. I particularly liked the kindly response of a Jewish mom from New Jersey whose son had failed at a late stage to spell 'banns', which she considers an obscure gentile word. 'I feel sorry for the boy from Texas who got "yenta",' she remarks.

The 'cast': Harry Altman, Angela Arenivar, Ted Brigham, April DeGideo, Neil Kadakia, Nupur Lala, Emily Stagg, and Ashley White

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