E-Mail This Article to a Friend WORD WARS

"Language is a reflection of the people who use it," says Marlon Hill, one of the four Scrabble competitors (national ranking #29) profiled in Eric Chaikin & Julian Petrillo’s fascinating if circumscribed documentary. This quartet seem more a reflection of the language, creatures obsessed with the verbal game, with anagrams and esoteric words beginning with "q" and winning the National Scrabble Championship in San Diego. Like last year’s Spellbound, which covered the national spelling bee, Word has a kind of Rocky excitement about it as the contestants get closer to their goal. Unlike Spellbound, however, Word fails to put its eccentrics into a broader context. They’re hardly a diverse or broadly representative group — Hill is a black guy from Baltimore, but the other three are white, middle-class, and neurotic, and as rarefied as some of the words they come up with. But the film does mirror its subjects’ odd talent with its own verbal wit, and though it doesn’t come up with a "bingo" (in Scrabble jargon, a seven-letter rack-clearing word worth a 50-point bonus) of its own to resolve its assortment of thematic odds and ends, it does add to one’s vocabulary. (78 minutes)