Word Wars

Scrabble is a word game people play at home; there is also the world of those who give their lives to it. Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo's documentary attaches itself to four competitors and follows them through the nine months leading to the national championship. Memorised dictionaries, calculated probabilities, letter strings repeated at night. What is interesting about the film is not the game but the lives of the people playing it. Most of them have pushed everything else into second place for it: work, money, health, relationships. The directors neither mock them nor exhibit them as curiosities; what they have gained and what they have lost are shown with the same calm. The tension at the championship tables is genuinely high. It screened at Sundance and was nominated for documentary awards.