Wordplay

Each year around March, around 500 men, women and children descend upon the Marriot Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut to participate – compete really – in the National Crossword Puzzle Championship, conceived and hosted by The New York Times Crossword Editor Will Short, a skinny, mustached man who looks like an accountant. The competition lasts for three days and consists of seven crossword puzzles and an eighth for the three finalists. There are no elimination rounds: participants do the first seven puzzles, points are tallied up (according to time completed, blank squares and correct answers) and the finalists are given fifteen minutes to complete a giant puzzle on a grand stage in front of 500 people and whoever completes it in the least amount of time with the fewest errors, wins.

To be honest, I could give a damn about crossword puzzles. This may be some kind of sacrilege considering I live in a city with a newspaper containing the most prestigious crossword puzzle in the country and quite possibly the world. But I’ve always found the Times’ crossword puzzle an exponentially descending experience: Monday’s is easy, Tuesday’s a bit less, Wednesday’s nothing short of difficult, Thursday’s/Friday’s/Saturday’s aggressively intimidating and Sunday’s the equivalent of spiritual enlightenment or dating a supermodel: fun to fantasize about but it ain’t happening. I’d be a monkey with a typewriter chancing upon ‘Hamlet’ if I could fill in one letter correctly. This doesn’t bother me because as I said earlier in this paragraph, I don’t care about ‘em.

Lucky for us however, a man named Patrick Creadon does care and he’s put together a wonderfully informative and suspenseful film called ‘Wordplay,’ (Jeremy – who does care about Crossword Puzzles – and I saw the film at BAM but it’s also playing at IFC Center, Beckman One and Two and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. Outside the five boroughs, you’re on your own)

‘Wordplay’ takes its subject seriously but is never condescending or pretentious. It gives us a brief history of The Crossword Puzzle with a special emphasis on the New York Times Puzzle, takes the time to explore the appeal of puzzles in general and the construction of Crossword puzzles in particular and then follows five people as they make their way to the National Championship. Interspersed between all this are interviews with such Crossword Puzzle fans as John Stewart (host of ‘The Daily Show’), Mike Mussina (pitcher for the New York Yankees), Ken Burns (director of PBS’ Civil War documentary), The Indigo Girls (enthusiastic to be used in a crossword puzzle) and William Jefferson Clinton (if you don’t know who he is, I don’t even know what to tell you). Creadon moves back and forth between the participants with a light and admiring touch and allows each of his subjects to explain his relationship to the puzzle.

My favorites involved Bill Clinton drawing an effective and strangely thoughtful parallel between solving a puzzle and solving more pressing issues (start with what you know and work outward, using it to find the information you’re less familiar with) and then using that to chime in on the nature vs. nurture debate; Ellen Ripstein, a former Crossword champion who, responding to a boyfriend calling her a Crossword geek, replies ‘What are you best in the country at?’; and, forever enshrining himself in the Pantheon of Endearing Geekdom, Norman ‘Trip’ Payne, the youngest ever to win the championship, explaining why he’s “intrigued” by the letter ‘Q’. (The letter ‘Q’ is normally followed by the letter ‘U’, but if you’re not careful, words like ‘qatar’ and ‘q-tip’ can totally throw you off your game).

‘Wordplay’ culminates in the 2005 National Championship and rather than play up the suspense, Creadon throws us a curve and generously shows us the human side of the competitors and the competition. At one point, he interviews a woman who won the competition in the late seventies who confides to us that her husband died on the last day of a competition. This story is used as a voiceover for a talent show in which the crossword competitors take part. (Ellen Ripster takes the stage and shows off her baton skills. I loved her for this). The woman says that while she still expects to see her husband walk through the hotel’s revolving door, she continues to return each year because of the people. They are like a family to her and even though they’ve changed over the years, she says it’s difficult to tell how because the changes happened so slowly.

I won’t tell you how the competition turns out but I will say a deserving person wins and a deserving person loses in unexpected fashion. There are twists and turns and loops and skeedaddles and even though I am still less than enthusiastic about crossword puzzles, there was not a dull moment in this picture. What all this is supposed to say about humanity I’m not sure but see the movie and figure it all out for yourself because it’s not solving the puzzle that’s important but how you approach it.

As a side note: BAM has taken away the $10 popcorn/drink special. Jeremy and I are writing letters but hopes are not high. It could be we were the only ones to ever take advantage of it. It is a sad day indeed.