Fear Of The Game

I just saw Word Wars, a documentary about top Scrabble players. I'm not ashamed to say these are my people and I enjoyed the movie.

I did have one problem, though. It's not that it was projected on video. It's not that it didn't have as much time to get into the story as Stefan Fatsis's book Word Freak. No, the documentary suffered from what I call Fear of the Game.

The filmmakers are so afraid viewers will tune out if they spend too much time concentrating on the game that they only give us glimpses of actual play. Perhaps they're right. But I'm a Scrabble fan and I wanted to see some Scrabble. I wanted to see the tiles being picked, considered, rearranged, then placed on the board for maximum effect. I wanted to see strategy--forgoing higher points to make sure you don't open up a triple-word score, for instance. Instead, we get a quick shot or two of a bingo, and that's supposed to satisfy us.

I noticed the same problem in the film Searching For Bobby Fischer. There was never a clear, held shot of the chess board so you could see where the game stood. In the big finish, where hero Josh figures out how to win a tough game (in real life, Josh barely salvaged a tie to win the tournament, but Hollywood would never go for that), the play goes by so quickly you can hardly tell what's happening. This may be because the race for queening at the end is so clearly to the disadvantage of Josh's opponent we'd soon realize how foolish he is.

There is one film I can think of that, while concentrating mostly on non-chess matters, does give you enough of a view of the board, with brilliant endplay, to satisfy. That's The Luzhin Defence. Luzhin is a chess genius who cannot conform to normal life. He kills himself, but his wife finishes his last game for him, based on his notes. We get to see these moves and can understand how they work. I have not read the original Nabokov novel, but I get the feeling the chess game was created specifically for the movie. If so, good work.