When I was a kid, I used to play Scrabble with my father, and he always won -- except once. The one time I beat him, I kept the scoresheet for two years. After my parents split up, I began playing the game on Friday nights with the kid next door -- a bright kid from an incurious family whose vocabulary grew in leaps and bounds in pursuit of the ever-elusive double-triple word score and words that contained both "Z" and "Q". In those pre-video game days, Scrabble was chess for language geeks; a gentleman's game characterized by dead silences punctuated only by the gentle click of polished wood tiles against rough wood racks as four more useless "T"s and "R"'s were withdrawn from the blue velvet sack.

Alas, I haven't played Scrabble for years, but there are those who are as fanatical about Scrabble as most Americans are about sports, and in WORD WARS, the hilarious yet suspenseful documentary by Julian Petrillo and Eric Chaiken, the competitive world of Scrabble (yes Scrabble), is exposed in all its geeky glory.

Geek culture is an easy target for today's documentaries, and most of them treat their subjects with derision. Films like Trekkies and Cinemania showcase these subcultures as havens for the homely, the obese, the overly hirsute, the prematurely bald, the stutterers, the pseudo-intellectuals with no social skills, and the just plain obsessed. These films make it easy for even the most ordinary schmuck to feel superior to the so-called losers who write Klingon dictionaries and the obsessive-compulsives who map out their lives solely in terms of the movies they're going to see each day. WORD WARS bears more of a resemblance to last year's acclaimed Spellbound, about competitive preteen spellers on their way to the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee,in that it is a far more sympathetic and affectionate look at its particular niche of geek subculture than most films which document the obsessions that denote the various tribes of American geekdom.

For the warriors of Scrabble Nation, the game isn't something to bond with Dad over, or a harmless Friday evening pastime. To them, Scrabble is deadly serious business, and these players devote their lives to preparation for the fiercely competitive tournaments that form the benchmarks of their lives and their identities. They study the dictionary as avidly as any pre-teen spelling bee contestant, seeking that word no one has ever heard of that will provide the mega-double-digit point totals that separate the men from the boys in this game.

But there is another side to Scrabble Nation, this one home to those talented individuals too cowardly, too poor to afford hotel rooms, or just lacking the warrior spirit for this kind of mortal intellectual combat. These are the second tier of Scrabblophiles -- guys who hang out in Washington Square Park, longtime haven for streetcorner intellectuals -- no less obssessed than the competitive players, but unwilling or unable to go mano-a-mano with the leaders, the winners, the self-styled gurus of competitive Scrabble -- guys like Joe Edley, the game's only three-time National Champion, going for his fourth, who keeps his grip on reality through a strict Tai Chi regimen, and the only one of the players depicted herein who seems to live a normal life. Or Matt Graham, the aspiring stand-up comic fueled by Dunkin' Donuts coffee and secret "energy drugs" which give him a slight resemblance to a ball bouncing endlessly off the bumpers in a pinball machine. Or Marlon Hill, the self-styled angry black man who decries the irrational rules of English and gives lip service to Ebonics as a valid form of the English language, but can unscramble just about any rack of letters into a double-digit point total. Or “G.I.” Joel Sherman, a former champion and Woody Allen character come to life, who achieved his nickname not on the battlefield, but in the bathroom, where he is plagued by gastrointestinal problems. Loneliness is his lot in life, with only Maalox as his trusted companion.

Like fictional films, documentary films work best when the characters are richly-drawn individuals whom we grow to care about over the course of the film. It would be easy to go for the cheap laugh by allowing us to feel superior to Edley's eccentricity, Graham's manic arrogance, Hill's seeming hypocrisy about his chosen "sport", and Sherman's lack of intestinal fortitude (sorry). But there is too much wit and too much heart to these guys for them to be easily dismissable by simply allowing the audience to feel superior. The filmmakers may have found these characters through Stefan Fatsis' book Word Freaks, but co-director Chaikin, a former Scrabble geek himself, has a very real affection for these guys, and makes this film stand out from other recent documentaries spotlighting the many subcultures that make up Geek America. This particular Fab Four, with their dysfunctional yet oddly symbiotic relationships with each other, may just constitute the most entertaining ensemble cast we've seen yet this year.

The film moves along breezily, expertly constructed so that we get to know the characters enough to pick favorites as they gear up for the big national competition. Punctuated by graphics that open the door to the thought processes of the Scrabble-obsessed in constructing words, the film draws us into this world as almost a participant instead of a mere spectator. We may not want to live these men's lives, but we certainly root for their success as they pursue their own unconventional dreams.

Yet there's something very hopeful about the sight of thousands of English language junkies gathering like gladiators, with Holiday Inn ballrooms subbing for the Colisseum. We live in a country where the current President's verbal gaffes are regarded as charming instead of inarticulate, and where even the venerable New York Times is rife with misuses of "its" and "it's", and the occasional "irregardless." It's encouraging to see that there are still articulate people who care about language and its important role in civilized culture.

-- Jill Cozzi

(pictured, top to bottom: Joel Sherman, Marlon Hill, Joe Edley, Matt Graham)

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