He loves America: “If you work hard, you’ll make it,” he avers, and he has Neil working superhumanly hard, drilling him endlessly and hiring tutors in French, Spanish, and German to supplement his school’s program in Latin. In wealthy San Clemente, Calif., we don’t see much of Neil-the focus is on his Indian father, whose children are vessels for his seemingly boundless ambition. I rise above all my problems.” Trying to convince herself as much as Blitz’s camera, Ashley makes you want to cry. But the girl herself-dressed in immaculate white-is radiant. Ashley’s mother sits smoking at her kitchen table, listing the obstacles her daughter has had to overcome, bitter over the lack of attention: The winner of the Washington metro bee, Ashley doesn’t even have a trophy. Then it’s on to the well-to-do Emily, who has a nice Connecticut home, an au pair, and a warmly supportive community and Ashley, an African-American girl in southeast Washington, D.C., who has little community support or recognition. “There are a couple of smart kids in my class but not many,” he says-not sounding snotty, just lonely. The order of the stories is significant, with the worldly, confident Nupur followed by Ted, a rural Missouri kid whose sense of isolation is palpable. To select his subjects, Blitz and his co-producer, Sean Welch, reportedly combed lists of returning regional champions and picked the brains of countless officials and coaches. Who could have anticipated that a spelling competition would yield such a heartbreaking thriller? But these kids aren’t expendable drawing-room-mystery victims: It’s devastating to watch their stabs of grief when they misspell obscure words (care for a hellebore, anyone?) and the bell goes ding! The movie becomes a nail-biter, the audience hanging on every letter. The second half is the bee itself, in Washington, D.C., where Blitz shows them knocked off, one by one, as in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None-a favorite of the director’s. The first half introduces them singly in their hometowns: five girls and three boys from all over the country, from different races and economic classes-Angela, Nupur, Ted, Emily, Ashley, Neil, April, and wacky Harry. The movie is chiefly a portrait of eight aspiring contestants and their families. But the contest turns out to have a deeper resonance than if the sport had been merely physical: Among other things, mastery of the English language becomes a means of affirming one’s American-ness. On its most basic level, Jeff Blitz’s Spellbound (ThinkFilm) documents the 1999 nerd Olympics: 9 million nationwide spelling-bee contestants reduced to 249 finalists reduced to one winner.
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