MOVIES: Wordplay (Patrick Creadon, 2006)

Charming documentary about crossword puzzles and the people who solve them.

The movie revolves around Will Shortz, who edits the New York Times crossword, hosts the weekly Sunday puzzle on National Public Radio, and organizes an annual crossword tournament in Stamford, Connecticut. He's a lifelong puzzle fanatic, having gone so far as to design his own major at Indiana University, making him the only person with an academic degree in Enigmatology.

We also watch Merl Reagle, one of the top crossword constructors, at work creating a puzzle. That's a fascinating process to observe, and you begin to understand that solving the puzzle is the easy part; creating it is the real challenge. Shortz talks about the fact that every puzzle is really a collaboration between the creator and the editor. As an editor, Shortz re-writes as many as half of the clues for each puzzle, to correct factual errors, to conform to Times style, and to make the clues match the needed level of difficulty for the day on which it will appear (puzzles get progressively difficult from Monday to Saturday, and re-writing the clues might be all it takes to turn a Monday puzzle into a Thursday puzzle).

Later, we sit in as several celebrity crossword fans solve Reagle's puzzle. What's amusing about those scenes is the way in which working the puzzle seems to concentrate the personality. Jon Stewart is funny and mock-angry, treating each puzzle as another battle in an undeclared war with Shortz; Bill Clinton is thoughtful and articulate, explaining what the crossword can teach us about diplomacy and human relationships. The Indigo Girls are earnest and a bit self-absorbed, reminiscing about the first time they saw themselves as a puzzle answer; documentarian Ken Burns crams so much smugness and pretension into his brief appearance that it's like being forced to sit through another one of his 12-hour monstrosities.

The second half of the movie focuses on Shortz's tournament, and the movie benefits immensely from Brian Oakes's animated graphics, which allow us to follow along as the contestants work on the puzzles. Oakes's work is very smartly conceived and executed, and contributes greatly to the tension that builds in the last half-hour of the film. Creadon also had the good luck to be present for a tournament in which the final round was particularly dramatic and hearbreaking.

Do you have to be a crossword fan yourself to enjoy Wordplay? I don't think so, not any more than you had to love spelling to enjoy Spellbound, or know how to tango to enjoy Mad Hot Ballroom. Keith's Rule to Live By #26 tells us that people talking about their passion are almost always interesting, even if their passion is something that would normally bore you to death. Wordplay has a lot of colorful personalities, a suspenseful ending, and some insights into the longevity of the crossword puzzle. It's a lot of fun.