Clinton's Wordplay

Watching the DVD Wordplay last night, I remembered why I still love Bill Clinton, no matter what I may think of triangulation or the end results of NAFTA. About a third of the way through the film, the movie covers the 1996 pre-election crossword puzzle, where the correct answer for 39 Across- "The Next President" could either be "Clinton" or "Bob Dole." Dole appears briefly, comfortable in his curmudgeonly elder statesman role, smiling that that when he solved it in the morning, he thought he would win, only to be crushed at night. Of course, we're not supposed to believe for a moment that this is true. Dole is playing the graceful loser role that he's found comfortable after his humiliating defeat. I have no idea if he does crosswords in his spare time, though my guess based on his absence from the rest of the documentary is that he doesn't. Clinton, on the other hand enthuses endlessly about the brilliance of fitting the vertical clues with either answer, and would probably go on for hours about every square on the grid. As is, he ties the crossword beautifully to a perpetual theme of his, that human potential is greater than we think. Crossword puzzles, as he expresses them, aren't a matter of elite one-upmanship, but a way that anyone can better themselves, learn to think more flexibly about the word.

The movie itself draws you into by generally presenting clues that don't rely on specialized knowledge, or vocabularly. They're answers you could get, they just give the solution so fast that only an expert could beat the movie. Or at least that's what I tell myself to keep from crying myself to sleep. It was persuasive enough as to the open spirit of crosswords that I'm going to go look up pricing plans the New York Times Crossword after I finish blogging.

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the final competition never feels terribly involving. Unlike films like Spellbound, or Hands on a Hard Body, Wordplay has no sense of desperation of driving passion to compete. With a few exceptions, all the crossword enthusiasts all seem like normal people who are just a little smarter and faster than the rest of us. Someone describes a 20 year old prodigy's competitive spirit with "Tyler is like a tiger for this" and the shot the filmmakers find to illustrate her statement seems to more prove that he's got a crick in his back.

None of that is to say that it's not still as compelling a film as could possibly be made about guys filling letters into tiny boxes.