Spellbound

Who’d have thought that a documentary about spelling would be one of the most tension-filled, broadly American films of the year? True, some of us here at The Rake find it fascinating to see a bunch of bright young folks on the fast track to careers in the glamorous field of magazine copyediting, but we wouldn’t expect the rest of you to get excited about it. You ought to, though. This Oscar-nominated look at the 1999 national spelling bee is about spelling bees the way Hoop Dreams was about basketball—namely, only on the surface. Deep down it’s about much bigger themes, like the melting pot and the American Dream. Spellbound introduces us to eight finalists and their families, a quorum of nerds from wildly divergent ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. One’s well-to-do father pays for a team of private tutors; another is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who doesn’t speak English. Director Jeffrey Blitz avoids what could have been D-U-L-L by making sure we get to know the kids—which is why we feel the same nailbiting anxiety as the boy at the microphone struggling through “Darjeeling.” (It certainly doesn’t hurt that Blitz has an eye for irony; that boy’s parents are from India.)


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