Bad Words

Jason Bateman's first film as director, with himself in the lead. Guy Trilby is a man in his forties. He enters the national spelling bee by exploiting a gap in the rules: the requirement is not to have completed the eighth grade, and Guy has not. So he is technically eligible. What he is doing it for goes unexplained for a long time. Meanwhile he wears the children down psychologically, fights with the parents and damages the organisation. An Indian American boy, Chaitanya, attaches himself to him, and the odd friendship softens the film. Its riskiest quality is the humour: what Guy says to the children is deliberately cruel, and the film is in no hurry to make him likeable. Kathryn Hahn plays a journalist and Rohan Chand plays Chaitanya. A good choice for anyone who likes black comedy and is untroubled by an unpleasant lead. But when Guy's actual reason emerges the film lands somewhere far more ordinary than expected, and some of the crude humour leans on racial cliché.