Wordplay (***) [opened June 23]

This movie’s appeal is puzzling, so if you’ve ever wondered about the kind of person who can complete a crossword in three minutes, or would want to, a documentary centered around the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament may be what you’re looking for.

More so than for narrative films, one’s opinion of a documentary depends a lot on one’s interest in the subject matter, and it’s probably especially true for Patrick Creadon’s exploration of the crossword puzzle. Or, more precisely, The New York Times crossword puzzle. The star of the film is Times crossword editor Wil Shortz. He actually has a degree in the science of puzzles, called “enigmatology.” (Google it and most of the hits are about Shortz.) The movie’s central event is the 2005 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, created by Shortz and held in Stamford, CT. Creadon’s approach is like that of Spellbound, which profiled leading National Spelling Bee contestants and finished with the event itself. As with the spellers, the audience can play along a bit and probably feel much inferior. These guys (and some women) fill in the blanks about as quickly as I could fill in random letters. On the other hand, there are also some non-expert celebrity cruciverbalists (curiously, the word meaning crossword enthusiast never is used in the movie) who made me feel a little less dumb. The Indigo Girls compare puzzle solving to songwriting, former President Clinton uses it as a metaphor for tackling political problems, and Jon Stewart makes no point, but does it humorously. My favorite part was actually watching Merl Reagle (a frequent Times puzzle contributor whose work also appears in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer) create a puzzle with the movie’s title as a theme. If you’ve never once wondered how they do that, this isn’t the movie for you. My only criticism would be that I would have liked to see a bit broader focus. Do the contestants like other games? How many other newspapers publish crosswords? Do people in other countries like crosswords as much as Americans? When did the crossword first become popular? It’s a puzzle.

IMDb link