Saxophonist and Ex-President Bill Clinton Featured in a Documentary
WORDPLAY, a film by Patrick Creadon, starring Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Jon Stewart, Will Shortz and many other puzzle fans and perpetrators.
Surprise, surprise! I actually saw this film in a Greenwich Village movie house and the place was nearly full. That’s right, to see a documentary movie about crossword puzzles. My own reason for checking this film out was more than just satisfying my own curiosity about an activity I had become addicted to years ago, but to see what lessons there were to be learned in it for the publisher of NMC. Sure enough, there were some.
As any good documentary filmmaker will tell you — and I have made films in my younger days and learned this particular lesson — you should try to provide as many surprises as possible about your subject. Director Patrick Creadon knows this quite well. The fact was brought up soon enough that the solving of crossword puzzles is an activity much loved by people in certain pursuits and professions. High on the list are physicians and, yes, musicians. Should that really surprise anyone? Of course, we can draw a triangle to show that many doctors also love music and many in fact play instruments and form their own musical groups. So there is a broad brushstroke one can draw to describe doctors’ interests, clearly things that are intelligent yet relaxing, so as to help release them from the demands of their everyday pursuit. The relationship between wordplay and music, on the other hand, is an inherently artistic one.
Let’s digress a moment to see how. Music may well have preceded our ability to communicate via speech, but in a more advanced stage they are both structured in similar terms. A speech or a melody can be simple or can be complex. Speech becomes complex when metaphors and illustrations and rhetoric begin to show up. This is where word play may also come into the picture. Music has its own metaphors, its fun devices. Essentially, music and wordplay are similar crafts.
The fact is that this relationship is already borne out by history. And it goes far, far beyond the obvious example that always arises, Sir Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.” Almost all of the great musical masterworks are artistic accomplishments of sublime mystery. Sir Edward’s work was much closer to the idea of wordplay, however, in the sense that he was relating to his audience with what appears now to have been a great sense of fun, which he carried to his grave. All of the efforts to decipher the supposed mysterious inner melody that runs throughout have been squashed by musicologists. One can only imagine the composer chuckling to himself as the activity and the speculations got underway while he was still alive. He could have been as easily pleased by the fact that he wrote a very fine, lasting work of orchestral music that did not require extraneous hulabaloo.
Puzzlers do engage in specific devices that are shared by composers, as well, namely, anagrams, palindromes, cryptograms, jigsaws, coded messages, etc., etc. A wonderful palindrome was devised by Paul Hindemith in his wildly hilarious opera “Hin und Zuruck.” This probably has to be staged for full effect because watching singing actors reverse every one of their prior actions, every one of their uttered phonemes, every single sung note has got to be a tour de force of the highest order. Using technology to achieve the same results is much more difficult. When the center of the piece is reached, the depiction of a murder, there is a great hush and the audience is left to wonder what next. Everything is then reversed, and the opera has now become a great big joke. Murder, by the way, is a subject Hindemith played with often during his Weimer days. And it may well be true that certain times and places allow for more opportunities for fun and games than other periods. We all know that the show was over for Hindemith when Hitler came along.
So, getting back to the movie, it should also come as no surprise that we are given a peek at the work of a living composer, Jon Delfin. With seven victories to his credit, Mr. Delfin happens to be the most frequently crowned champion at Will Shortz’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT), held for many years in Stamford, CT. In this one really fine vignette he is shown working on a song with a woman whom he finds talented and understanding of the music and lyrics she is performing. He recognizes her struggle to succeed, and she responds with in-kind comments about him that are telling. Yes, the scene does digress from the matter at hand, but there is a good reason Mr. Creadon and his co-writer Christine O’Malley included it: they wanted to make it clear that Jon Delfin may be brilliant, knowledgeable, a store of information about just about everything, but that he is no automaton. He comes off as a flesh-and-blood human being with sensitivity and very serious intent. And yet, one cannot help but know it is the tools of his own trade that allow him the capacity to become a crossword puzzle-solving champion.
The film does not lack in examples of people being shown at their best and, in one or two instances, at their worst, during the Stamford competition. If there is a problem, it is that the scenes surrounding the event go on for too long. As a reviewer with his own prejudices, I surely would have preferred to hear more from Bill Clinton, from Jon Stewart, from Ken Burns, from puzzlemeister Will Shortz himself, from those who construct and edit puzzles, as well as solve them, and perhaps why crosswords attract certain types more than others. But a movie that succeeds overall in conveying the joy, the fun, yes, the humanity, behind wordplay? That’s a small miracle in itself. (BLC)
Links to other websites covering the film and/or its tangential subjects:
http://www.wordplaythemovie.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Crossword_Puzzle_Tournament
http://movies.aol.com/movie/wordplay/24984/main?sem=1&ncid=AOLMOV00170000000009