SALON

Friday, Jun 16, 2006 11:00 AM UTC

“Wordplay”

This charming documentary about the New York Times crossword puzzle and the people who love it is filled with myriad delights.

By

Topics: Movies,

In “Wordplay,” Patrick Creadon’s affectionate, charmingly woolly documentary about the New York Times crossword puzzle and the word nuts who love it, Jon Delfin, a professional musician and crossword-puzzle champ, says plainly, “Give me blank spaces and I want to fill them in.” Doing the crossword puzzle — particularly the New York Times puzzle, which progresses from Shaker straightforwardness on Mondays to wild Rococo difficulty on Saturdays — is ostensibly a simple pleasure, one that requires only the paper, your brain and a pencil (although, of course, braver souls prefer to use a pen). But that simplicity is deceptive: “Wordplay” suggests how easy it is to get lost in these miniature worlds of boxes and black squares. Even though these puzzles are mapped out with utmost precision — and even though logic is an extremely useful tool for solving them — they’re still, somehow, objects of intrigue and mystery.

The man behind the mystery, as he’s revealed to us in “Wordplay,” is Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times puzzle. (He’s also the “Puzzle Master” of National Public Radio.) Shortz doesn’t write the puzzles himself; he relies on a cadre of professional puzzle “constructors,” a few of whom are interviewed here. But crossword fans consider him responsible for all the pleasure and anxiety elicited by those empty, beckoning little boxes, as their occasional outraged letters to him suggest. As one persnickety puzzler writes, questioning the accuracy of a certain clue: “Frogs leap, sir, but toads do not. They waddle.”

Shortz also founded, and hosts, the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, now in its 29th year, where competitors scribble and scratch away to vie for the honor of being the fastest, and most accurate, crossword-puzzle solver in the land. (And woe to anyone who declares himself finished with a puzzle only to realize he’s left one empty square; in the rough world of competitive crossword-puzzle solving, that single lonely space will cost ya.)

Even though Shortz’s self-imposed mandate is to tease and challenge both his loyal followers and those who might attempt a puzzle only occasionally, there’s nothing sadistic-looking about him: He’s a solid average-looking middle-aged guy, affable and quick and perhaps slightly mischievous. His good-natured averageness is of a piece with the humble, everyday quality of crossword puzzles, the way they become part of a pleasurable daily routine. “Wordplay” cuts to the heart of the way crossword enthusiasts feel about that routine, featuring interviews with fans like Jon Stewart (who announces to the camera that he’s feeling so confident on this particular Tuesday, he’s going to use a Sharpie); Bill Clinton (who says that he sometimes likes to do the puzzle over lunch, while eating by himself at home — and whose own name was part of a particularly ingenious Times puzzle); and former Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent (who has one of the movie’s driest, funniest moments, tossing away the rest of the paper as if it were just a useless wrapper for the real treasure).

“Wordplay” is Creadon’s debut as a director, and it’s informed both by his love for crosswords and his clear affection for the sorts of people who do them. There’s the self-described “nerd girl” Ellen Ripstein, a New York editor who won the tournament in 2001 after 18 years of coming frustratingly close to the title. (Creadon shows us footage of the victory, with Ripstein leaning down from the stage to ask the judges, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” as applause thunders around her.) Ripstein is part self-effacing pussycat and part competitive tigress: While she clearly enjoys socializing with her fellow tournament participants (this a convivial, close-knit group, and many of these people have been attending for years, even if they have no hope of winning), at one point she confesses, good-naturedly, that she wouldn’t be too upset if one of her rivals happened to have a canceled flight or something. And while she’s modest about being a champion, she doesn’t hide how proud she is. She mentions that she once had a boyfriend who put her down, and she put up with it until she found the perfect rejoinder: “Well — what are you the best in the world at?”

The last section of “Wordplay” focuses on the 2005 tournament, held in Stamford, Conn. And while Creadon can’t quite build the kind of suspense that Jeff Blitz did in the spelling-bee documentary “Spellbound” (partly because grown-ups in competition aren’t quite as poignant as little kids are), he doesn’t lose momentum — the picture is crisply edited (by Doug Blush), and by the movie’s last third we have enough invested in the characters to care about who’s going to win.

But “Wordplay” is at its best when Creadon is burrowing deep into the world of the puzzles themselves, particularly when he sits down with puzzle constructor extraordinaire Merl Reagle. Reagle is one of those jolly guys who at first seems vaguely gruff — a bit like Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” movies. When Reagle sees signs on the street, he unconsciously rearranges their letters: “Dunkin’ Donuts” becomes “Unkind Donuts”; “Noah’s Ark” becomes “No, a shark!” And when he sits down at a table and approaches an empty grid, first determining the symmetrical arrangement of black boxes and then starting with a few key words, we feel we’re watching a master at work: The number of odd little things he has to consider in order to make a good puzzle, or even just one that simply works — finding trouble spots where the placement of certain vowels could cause problems, for example — may surprise even people who do these puzzles every day.

Later, Creadon uses some clever cross-cutting to show us several people working on the puzzle Reagle has created: We see both Clinton and Stewart muttering aloud, and with thinly disguised admiration, over the clue to which “ICBM” is the answer. That’s just one of the myriad delights of “Wordplay”: The way it portrays the Times crossword puzzle as an everyday pleasure that draws people into a kind of community. In neighborhoods and cities all over the country (and probably other parts of the world, too), there are people mulling over the same clues and scribbling out the same answers. And cursing Will Shortz, even as they anticipate what he has up his sleeve for tomorrow.

Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 3 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations