The recent boom in televised non-athletic games—spelling bees, poker, and the like—is due in large part to the competitors, as well as distinctly cracked personalities. The documentary Word Wars addresses competitive Scrabble, and, like the bestseller Word Freak, it's more about the players than the game. Robotically digging in their letter bags, rearranging the letters on street signs in their heads, and memorizing legal letter combinations with little regard for what the words they form actually mean, high-level Scrabble players aren't so much smart and verbose as they are obsessive.
Word Wars co-director Eric Chaikin plays tournaments himself, and he knows the key figures. Yet the documentary he's assembled with filmmaking partner Julian Petrillo doesn't offer much insight into the particulars of tournament-level Scrabble. Aside from a detour into the history of the Scrabble dictionary and a little introduction to terms like "bingo" (the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles in the rack), Word Wars is mostly concerned with showing how weird top players can be. Petrillo and Chaikin adopt a surprisingly mocking tone early on, playing up the contrast between these bug-eyed social misfits and the average citizens who share their hotels on tournament weekends. The movie has a bad case of the cutes, too, most notably when the directors edit interview footage to end on a laugh line. It could also use more inside information, like whether players take special pride in having their own style (say, preferring simple words to scientific terms), and how much they consider elements of strategy like laying down lesser-scoring words in order to block an opponent.
But Word Wars is ultimately as fascinating as it is frustrating. Even some of Petrillo and Chaikin's gimmicky effects—like floating animated letters resolving into combinations of words—are effective at demonstrating what goes through players' heads. And those players are undeniably magnetic in their oddity, from the cool-headed street competitors who spurn sanctioned contests to tourney regulars like the Maalox-swilling Joel Sherman and the foul-mouthed Black Nationalist Marlon Hill. Word Wars may not become the documentary hit that Spellbound was, because it's not as family-friendly—even the title comes from a semi-raunchy song by The Minutemen. But its depiction of Scrabble addicts playing practice games into the night and sweating out a rack full of vowels becomes affecting. Between the lines, it's really a portrait of the friendship that develops among those who flock to weekend tournaments to hang out with the only people who understand them.