Abecedarian adrenaline flows on spelling-bee stage

Little wonder that the final rounds of the National Spelling Bee are televised on ESPN. Nothing else in American sport - with the possible exception of triple-overtime in Game 7 of the NBA Finals - pumps more adrenaline into players and spectators.

Those who missed yesterday's 2003 finals on ESPN fortunately have Spellbound, the bewitching tale of eight contenders at the 1999 orthographic Olympics.

As affectionate as it is affecting, this nail-biter is a story of American achievers, some of whose mother and grandmother tongues help make English the linguistic smorgasbord it is - and thus so darned hard to spell. If choir (from the Latin for chorus) and quire (from the Middle English for a quantity of paper) are homonyms, imagine the complications of longer words.

Making his feature debut with this Oscar-nominated documentary (which lost to another masterpiece of Americana, Bowling for Columbine), Jeff Blitz gets into the shoes of these fascinating abecedarians, most of whom sit at the nerd table in their middle-school cafeteria. So what if they're not lettermen? They are letter-heads.

Spelling words they don't necessarily know the meanings of is hardly an index of intelligence. But the grueling preparation for the bee and the split-second decision-making required in competition is a gauge of the diligence, focus, and high-order reasoning common to intellectual athletes.

For each youth, spelling well is a vehicle for social mobility. Winning the national bee is the means by which Angela Arenivar, daughter of Mexican immigrants in a Texas cow town, or Ashley White, daughter of a single mom in Washington, might get scholarships to colleges their parents can't begin to afford.

For Angela as for Neil Kadakia, son of a subcontinental Indian entrepreneur who has emigrated to San Clemente, Calif., and for Nupur Lala, the child of Indian immigrants to Tampa, winning the bee would be a validation of Americanness.

Then there's goofy Harry Altman from Glen Ridge, N.J., a compulsive cutup, for whom the bee provides an opportunity for stand-up comedy. And poised Emily Stagg from suburban Connecticut, who needs a new frontier to conquer.

And then there is everyone's favorite, April Degideo of Ambler, a wryly funny teenager who, like Ted Brigham of a trailer park in rural Missouri, is the brainiac spawn of parents who can't pronounce the polysyllabic words their children can calculate etymologies of. (One of the film's implicit points is that even in the era of Spellcheck, spelling is important because it's evidence of understanding a word's source.)

Because Blitz is so big-hearted, you root for almost all the kids and their folks, who run the gamut from stage parent to cheerleader to jokingly self-described "child abuser," for enabling her daughter to be so obsessive about the bee.

I love this movie, and I love the pride, spirit and sportsmanship of the kids who represent the best of American pluck and luck. They are fine testaments to a land of champions, irresistible and irrepressible - and I hope I spelled those right.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Spellbound *** 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Jeff Blitz and Sean Welch, directed by Blitz, photography by Blitz, distributed by Think Film.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 mins.

Himself. . . Neil Kadakia

Herself. . . April Degideo

Herself. . . Nupur Lala

Herself. . . Ashley White

Himself. . . Harry Altman

Parent's guide: G (nothing offensive for younger children, of interest to those 10 and older)

Showing at: The Ritz Five and Ritz Sixteen/NJ