Spellbound
Directed by Jeffrey Blitz
Starring Harry Altman, Angela Arenivar, Ted Brigham, April DeGideo, Neil Kadakia, Nupur Lala, Emily Stagg and Ashley White

Note: This is not a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Just wanted to get that out of the way in case you were afraid another director was trying to remake one of his films, like Gus Van Sant did with Psycho (Just mentioning that incident makes me sick to my stomach).

Have you ever watched the National Spelling Bee on ESPN? Its pretty boring. All these kids spelling words that I’m pretty sure the judges made up a few minutes before they gave them to the kids. Its just plain weird. So who would think that a documentary about the 1999 National Spelling Bee would be at all interesting? I know, I was surprised too. Now I’ll admit I don’t know a ton about documentary filmmaking and I haven’t watched a great deal of documentaries either. But I think this is a well-crafted film. It is entertaining and provides an interesting and often surprising look at the personal lives of the children involved in the competition. The one main problem I have with this film is that Blitz tried to cover too much. His scope was too wide with 8 children. It would have been a much better film if there had only been 5 kids to focus on so more could be told about each of them. I was left wanting to know so much more about these kids that Blitz shared with me as the viewer. This flaw though doesn’t take away from what is overall a good film.

Making a documentary about a spelling bee must have been a difficult sell. There couldn’t have been a lot of distributors looking to put out a movie about spelling. But once you see it, there is no way to deny that this is a good film. The lives of the children are truly fascinating, but you are left wanting a little more. The roughly 5 minutes that are spent on each kid’s back-story just don’t give you all of what you want to know. You want to know how a child of parents who can’t speak English is able to be such a good speller. You want to know how the child of parents who never were able to get a good education managed to reach
the level they did. But Blitz just doesn’t give this to you. And if Blitz had only used less children he probably would have been able to tell more of these back-stories.

Blitz though did craft quite a good film. There is lots of good editing and he manages to build suspense for an event that is possibly the least suspenseful competition ever shown on TV. The kids are all rather interesting as are their parents. But the best performance is given by one of the girl’s dog. I think there needs to be Oscar consideration for that dog. He licks the leg of the mother of the kid in one scene and then appears to be dead in several other scenes. His performance is absolutely amazing.

If you like documentaries, I think you’ll certainly like this one. It is a little too much of a narrative though and doesn’t really say anything about spelling bee competitions and about pushing your kids into them. But it is crafted well even if its scope is too big. If you can find
this film in a nearby theater, I suggest you check it out. Its funny and quite enjoyable.

Rating 78%