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Film review

'Wordplay' is part teaser, part pleaser

By STEVE PERSALL
Published July 7, 2006

[IFC Films]

Wordplay includes a profile of New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz, who devised his own “enigmatology” major at Indiana University.

	It’s hard to make the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, captured in the film, look interesting. It’s a cerebral affair.
	He has all the questions Crossword puzzle culture comes to the big screen today with a film featuring local word master Merl Reagle.

One of the easiest ways to agitate newspaper readers is to fiddle with the crossword puzzle. Hell hath no fury like a crossword junkie who doesn't find that daily fix in the same place on the same page in the same type. Accidentally publish the wrong day's answers and feel their wrath. Misprint a clue and someone will atone.

The enduring obsession for these cryptic quizzes is explored in Wordplay, a documentary by Patrick Creadon that is sometimes only slightly more interesting than watching a crossword puzzle being solved. The process is typically so private and internal that transferring the experience to film can't avoid being incomplete.

Work around the dry spots - just as puzzlers work around difficult clues - and Wordplay makes an apparently mundane pastime seem exciting. Each day's puzzle is mind-to-mind combat between constructors and puzzlers. The information crammed into those down and across clues is habitual mental exercise for both sides. Crossword puzzles boost and topple self-image, but only for a few seconds, until the next challenge comes.

Creadon does a fine job explaining the history and mechanics of crosswords. For perspective he profiles Will Shortz, a freelance constructor who devised his own "enigmatology" major at Indiana University and rose to the highest level in this linguistic universe, as puzzle editor for the New York Times. The mechanics are described by Tampa resident Merl Reagle, whose crossword and Sudoku brain teasers appear in publications including the St. Petersburg Times.

Then Creadon turns his camera toward the worshippers at the altar of Shortz and Reagle. The results are mixed. It is a kick to watch celebrities such as Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Jon Stewart and the Indigo Girls struggle through a puzzle devised by Reagle for the movie while explaining their devotion to the pastime. They know how to be funny and reflective, or in Stewart's case, amusingly stumped.

The crossword impressions of ordinary people often pale in comparison. Creadon turns his attention to the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, where most of the entrants are introverts or, although no doubt very bright, just don't display much personality. Wordplay focuses on three players who will share a close finish but also conveys a family reunion spirit that is nice but slightly numbing. Like any onscreen competition, this movie needs someone to cheer or boo. Just a bit of trash talk would help, but that isn't the reality.

The low-tech nature of the tournament - paper puzzles handed out like FCATs - also hinders the cinematic possibilities. There is a twist in the finals that somehow doesn't play as dramatically as what the entrants experienced. Maybe the editing is lacking, or perhaps a guy scribbling at an easel simply isn't photogenic. Reagle mentioned in an interview that Creadon tried "filming the unfilmable" and at the movie's most critical point, he is correct.

However, Wordplay has enough solid material and intrinsic appeal to a diverse audience to be recommended. I just wish it had somehow broken the rules of documenting such a structured, intellectual endeavor. Rather than steadily moving across and down, Wordplay needs more moments working diagonally and up.

Steve Persall can be reached at (727) 893-8365 or persall@sptimes.com.

Wordplay

Grade: B

Director: Patrick Creadon

Cast: Will Shortz, Merl Reagle, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Jon Stewart, Mike Mussina, Indigo Girls Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, Ken Burns

Rating: PG; brief profanity

Running time: 94 min.

[Last modified July 7, 2006, 06:23:18]