Bad Words goes too far
April 15, 2014
Jason Bateman plays Guy Trilby, an adult in the national spelling bee, in the movie “Bad Words”. Using the national spelling bee as his stage, Trilby shows how horrible moms and dads who force their pre-teens into a world of headaches and heartaches while battling to be the nation’s best. Trilby, who grew up with his mother was always on the run. Therefore Trilby never got to compete in his own schools spelling bee which might explain why he wants to embarrass numerous parents.
Initially Trilby pushes his way into being a contestant in a local spelling bee. Trilby is a 40-year old who finds a loophole in the rules of the National Quill Spelling Bee and decides to cause trouble by hijacking the competition. A contestant cannot have graduated from eighth grade before a certain date, and since Trilby never graduated, he gets in. He explains in a voice-over at the start of the movie that this is part of a revenge plot.
Trilby is accompanied by a reporter Jenny, played by Kathryn Hahn, who is on his tail, eager to expose Trilby motivation for being in the spelling bee. After the National Spelling Bee, puts Trilby in a hotel supply closet as a room, he finds himself becoming friends with a competitor. An awkward 10 year old, Chaitanya, played by Rohan Chand, is completely unfazed by Trilby’s take-no-prisoners approach to life.
Chaitanya gets most of the laugh lines, while Trilby’s humor falls along a spectrum with uncomfortable jokes on one end. Chaitanya has no chance of turning Trilby into a cuddly teddy bear, but the kid does manage to become sort of a sidekick, an accessory to Trilby’s late-night partying and heartless pranks on strangers.
Trilby pushes on, using every dirty trick in the book to win the spelling bee. When the kids who are competing seem a little too successful, he offers verbal abuse which tend to leave people speechless. When officials give him the worst words in the book, he battles back and spells them. Contest officials, outraged parents and overly ambitious eighth graders are no match for Trilby, as he ruthlessly crushes their dreams of victory and fame.
Bateman, plastering his face with a depressing frown keeps viewers guessing what will happen next. Trilby has a great time dropping racist and sexist comments, treating everyone like a pest to be swatted away if they get in his way.
Another part of the hilarious shock of “Bad Words” is seeing Bateman play a stone-cold and a distrustful person. He is the type of man who will calmly tell you to get out of his face, and then toss in an uncalled for insult and really mean it. Bateman, who is often a nice and honest man, really stretches himself here. Bateman acts as a despicable man, and it might explain why, despite Trilby’s over-the-top flaws, is still worth watching.
“Bad Words” is a little balancing act between funny, disgust and compassion. “Bad Words” is correctly titled because Trilby uses all of them. The film is a parody of all those sentimental adult and child pairings that ends up sort of doing what they do, only with a wicked edge. The movie has high and lows times but all in the end, it is a good laugh.
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