Can you put the
word in a sentence?
by: Jeremy
Brodt
The letter "e" is all that stopped me from winning my school spelling bee. Miraculously, I had made it to the final round in my fourth grade class bee, but stumbled on the word vegetable (a word by the way which I have never spelled incorrectly since) and thus lost to a girl who knew the tricky silent "e" that hid in the seemingly easy word. Unfortunately, my spelling career died on that day. However, I was sick on the day of the big school bee anyway, and consequently even in spite of my defeat I was saved from the embarrassment of humiliating myself in front of the entire school. I later found out that the magic winning word was extraterrestrial, a word I still cannot spell to this day.
We have all had to do it at some grade level or another. Been forced to stand in front of the class for the ritual spelling bee. To many it is a rite of passage that allows us to judge whether or not we will become slaves to the spell check function on our computer or a dictionary, but to a select few it is a competition more fierce than any athletic sporting event.
Jeffery Blitz's fantastic debut film, SPELLBOUND, beautifully encapsulates the subculture of the spelling bee. While the concept of this film may superficially seem dull and uninteresting, this documentary is one of the most enthralling, humorous, and entertaining 95 minutes of cinema that I have seen in a long time. The movie follows eight young spelling hopefuls between the ages of 11-14 and their families in 1999 as they prepare for the pinnacle of all spelling bees, the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. The children and families that were followed in this film are a wonderful representation of the diversity of America. From coast to coast, indigent to affluent, and working class to immigrant, Blitz manages to capture eight unique backgrounds.
This film is astonishingly funny on many levels and yet at times shockingly disturbing. Each child and family in the film has its odd quirks that you just cannot shy away from laughing at. For example, the one boy (who clearly has some form of attention deficit disorder) when interviewed talks like a robot and will be best known for his extremely funny facial features. Likewise, while interviewing one family, the family dog gives an Oscar-worthy performance. And who can forget the Hooters restaurant in the one childís hometown that was so proud of their hometown hero that they congradulated him on their sign (yes, lets just say that they typically donít hire people at Hooters for the size of their brains and leave it at that).
This film also brings
to focus the disturbing reality of how a seemingly "fun" competition
often gets distorted into an extremely stressful ordeal. For instance,
the father of the one Indian child has hired a spelling coach to help
his son prepare. They would often go over as many as 7,000 words a day.
In addition, as though being at the National Spelling Bee was not stressful
enough his grandfather in India was willing to pay to feed 4,000 people
if he won the National Bee. Further, the distorted reality sets in when
one of the kids in the bee makes the conflicting statement, "I donít really
care where I place
All in all I found this movie extremely entertaining and would go so far as to state that it could easily compete with Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine as my favorite documentary of last year. Jeffery Blitz captured some priceless footage and could not have selected eight better and more unique regional spelling champs to follow. Spellbound is a unique movie going experience that is guaranteed to make you feel awe, empathy, laugh and above all have faith that the American Dream is not yet extinct.
posted 07.03.03
Jeremy is a graduate student at the University of Delaware. When he's not mating beatles he usually watches movies from Netflix with his girlfriend Mali. E-mail him at jbrodt@udel.edu.
2003 White Elephant
Productions