WORDPLAY

Director: Patrick Creadon (First major release, TV work including Maxim's Hot 100 ...)
Starring: Documentary including Will Shortz, Bill Clinton, John Stewart, puzzle solvers

Wordplay is a cute little documentary for the nerds among us who love crossword puzzles. Really, that's it. I could stop writing this review right now, and you would absolutely have the gist of the film.

The best documentaries often take a topic and then focus on the struggles of the people who happen to swirl around that topic. Some good ones (like Michael Moore's films) are purely visual editorial, more like journalism than story-making. This one is somewhere in the middle. It's a light-hearted little film that introduces characters to us (the nerds who love crosswords puzzles), but doesn't really tell us about them. It tries to claim that puzzles give a sense of home to dweebs around the country, but I don't know if I can really buy that notion. Mostly it just shows them doing puzzles and talking about why they like puzzles, and it works. I probably should mention I am one of those aforementioned dweebs who likes crossword puzzles. Been doing 'em for years. In ink. Any other way would be morally wrong. I don't know why, but it would.

The first half of this documentary introduces us to Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzles (the gold-standard of puzzledom). It also details those who actually write the puzzles (called constructors apparently), and intercuts this education into the world of puzzle-making with cute interviews with famous puzzle-solvers, including John Stewart, Bill Clinton, the Indigo Girls and Mike Mussina. This is the better half of the film, I think, at least for someone interested in these things. Hearing Clinton relate puzzle-solving to solving social issues once again made me think of how great a president he could have been. If he only could have stayed away from shady financial transactions and kept little Clinton tucked away, I think he certainly would have made the pantheon of notable leaders. I suppose he really would have needed a war or something as well, but I digress.

The second half of the film follows a group of puzzle-solvers in the yearly competition run by Shortz in a Marriott in Connecticut. These people are nuts! And I mean Nuh-Uts! They catalog their puzzle-solving times in huge ledgers, and try as hard as they can to do them faster and faster. Surprisingly, there's even a bit of drama in the competition itself, but I won't spoil that for you.

So anyway, this film doesn't really tell us about the lives of puzzle players, it touches on it. We know they're nerds. We know that these people come to the competition as much for comraderie as for a desire to be the best. In the end we don't know much more than that. Being a puzzle fan I did find the film interesting. I suppose that's enough. This was a cute film, engaging if puzzles seem interesting to you.

Standouts: The puzzles.
Blowouts: The competitor who does the thing that I can't tell you about. A bone-up for the ages. D'oh!

Grade: B+