Pop culture
seems to be growing less literate by the minute, but we're nevertheless in the
midst of a bona fide wordsploitation boom. While the dumbing down of pop
culture continues unabated, a nerdy insurgency has sprung up in the form of
films on spelling bees, crossword puzzles, Scrabble, and other cerebral
pastimes. Unsurprisingly, these movies have all been documentaries. After all,
how could a fictional narrative possibly capture the visceral excitement of real
obsessives placing letters in their correct order in a competitive,
pressure-cooker environment?
Undaunted by
such challenges, Akeelah And The Bee writer-director
Doug Atchison puts a fictional spin on the wordsploitation boom by plugging all
the magic and wonder of precocious, adorable children spelling difficult words
into the time-tested plucky-underdog-beats-the-odds template. In the process,
he's given word nerds their very own Karate Kid. Keke Palmer stars as a gifted young black student
who's forced to hide her smarts to survive in a tough neighborhood. When she
begins winning spelling bees, she attracts the attention of tough-but-loving
word guru Laurence Fishburne, who volunteers to serve as her coach and ends up
doing double duty as a father-figure. But will Angela Bassett's objections to
her daughter's passionate new pursuit spell doom for Palmer's chances of making
it to the national finals?
As the
conceptually similar documentary Spellbound proved, spelling bees are innately dramatic. But that doesn't keep
Atchison from constantly pushing the film toward theatrical moments instead of
letting the drama arise organically from the story. The script piles on so many
characters and subplots that a big chunk of its third act is devoted to a
series of drive-by resolutions which tidily wrap up every last story strand and
relationship. But if Atchison's well-acted, good-intentioned crowd-pleaser can
trick even one moviegoer into thinking that knowledge and spelling are somehow
cool, then his film will be performing a societal good that offsets its slack
reliance on formula.