Here's a documentary with plenty of tears, trials and tribulattions. No wait, tribblations. Erm... TRIBULATIONS!
Set in the stressful world of America's National Spelling Bee championships, where nine million children aged 12-14 compete for a place among 249 spellers in the live, televised final, Spellbound takes a hilarious look at one of America's best-loved institutions.
There's a cruel sense of mischievous pleasure in watching these kids struggling to spell words - "cephalalgia", "logorrhea" - that they don't understand and will never use in real life. As they wrestle with the alphabet, their faces contort in such terror and agony that you can't help but wonder, along with one of the film's interviewees, if this isn't some "different form of child abuse".
Like a sports day for geeks, the Spelling Bee is less about language then a celebration of that age-old American Dream of bettering one's self through hard graft. Reading against the grain of this voiceover-lite documentary, though, Spellbound frequently looks like an ironic exposé of America's dunderheaded pursuit of self-advancement above all else.
It's the throwaway asides that offer the most telling commentary. Interviewing the spellers and their parents, director Jeff Blitz builds up a catalogue of unintentional howlers.
There's the trailer trash Brigham family ("The older boy lacks direction, I think the Marines would be good for him. He likes guns and explosives."), the doddering old ranch owners wittering on about the Mexican father of one of the competitors, who "ain't lazy like most wetbacks", and the brother of one eliminated contestant who valiantly maintains, "I still think he spelt it right."
Quite how aware Blitz is of his Oscar-nominated film's subversive dissection of Middle American mores is a moot point. But from this side of the Atlantic, it looks like yet more proof that the Land of the Free really doesn't know the meaning of irony. Let alone how to spell it.
Spellbound (2003)
