>>PREVIEW
WORDPLAY
DIRECTED BY Patrick Creadon
Opens Friday, July 21
Uptown Screen
Your inability to divine an eight-letter word that is another name for bog moss and begins with the letter S will not impede your ability to enjoy Wordplay.
"I don’t think it really matters whether you’re a puzzle fan or not," says director Patrick Creadon. "I think this is a movie that works well because it’s about language, humanity and camaraderie. And it’s really, really funny."
While crossword puzzles and the people who love them are more readily associated with HB pencils than hot times, Creadon has seen his movie work its magic on audiences in the months since Wordplay earned big love at Sundance and began to assume "sure thing" status as one of the year’s breakthrough documentary successes. The movie’s Canadian premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival in April attracted a sold-out house with Natalie Portman and Dustin Hoffman among the patrons. Since its release in mid-June in the States, it’s earned almost US$1.5 million.
"Whether they’re fans of puzzles or they like documentaries or just like interesting storytelling, the movie seems to exceed people’s expectations," says Creadon. "It does way more than people think it’s going to."
Since Creadon and his wife Christine O’Malley remortgaged their house to finance the project, he is understandably relieved that it’s all turning out so swimmingly. A smart, breezy look at the history and appeal of crosswords, Wordplay begins as a profile of New York Times puzzle master Will Shortz with testimonials from celeb devotees like Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart and the Indigo Girls.
But in the process of shooting these folks (most of whom are seen beavering away at Times puzzles as they explain how they got hooked), Creadon and O’Malley discovered the cinematic potential of another of Shortz’s endeavours, the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which the moustachioed brainiac founded in 1978. "When we started we didn’t know there was a tournament," says Creadon. "That was not even on our radar."
The doc would be energized by the events of the 2005 edition of the annual throwdown (or maybe throw-across) for the nation’s fastest puzzlers. What happened at the tournament also disproved the filmmakers’ original notion that this was an essentially solitary pursuit. In effect, crosswords create a community.
"One of the things I learned by making the movie," says Creadon, "is that although our daily routines seem unique to us, they’re not really that unique. We have a lot more in common with each other than we think we do. That our lives are not terribly unique is in some ways very comforting to know. We’re all going through the same things together."
It also works in the movie’s favour that puzzle people are such good company. In the director’s view, that’s no accident.
"People who are puzzle fans are people who read the newspaper, who are aware of the world around them," says Creadon. "They know who their congressman is, who their senator is, who the President is – they can tell you a lot of things about a lot of things. The side benefits to doing a crossword are not trivial because people who do puzzles have to be engaged in the world around them.
"I wish there were more people like that," Creadon adds with a chuckle. "It’s the people who are not those things that I’m worried about."
(In case the clue in the first sentence is still bothering you, it’s sphagnum. That wasn’t even a hard one.) |
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