Forty-year-old Guy Trilby is a monster on a mission. The sooner you accept this, the more likely it is that you’ll enjoy Bad Words, an uncompromising comedy about an acerbic man who’s determined to win the prestigious Golden Quill spelling bee. Like most monsters, Trilby’s motives are initially unclear, which inevitably leads to his being misunderstood. Unlike many monsters, however—and this is the factor that may prevent some from truly connecting with Bad Words, even as they’re laughing in spite of themselves—the people who incur the brunt of his foulmouthed wrath are children. In the course of exploiting an arcane loophole to compete in the bee, Trilby will insult, embarrass, and humiliate anyone who dares get in his way—and most of the time, those unfortunate victims have yet to hit puberty.
The first time we meet Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman, making his feature directorial debut here), he is preparing to participate in the regional spelling bee that will secure his entry into the Golden Quill competition. With a little assistance from his sponsor, an online journalist named Jenny (Kathryn Hahn), he eventually blusters his way onto the stage. Trilby is next seen sprinting from the building, trophy in hand, as an army of enraged parents are in hot pursuit. Clearly he has won the battle, but will he win the war by taking the top spot? Not if current Golden Quill director Dr. Bernice Deagan (Allison Janney) and president Dr. Bowman (Phillip Baker Hall) have any say in the matter. Meanwhile, as the competition gets under way, the arrogant, abrasive Trilby reluctantly begins to forge an unlikely bond with Chaitanya (Rohan Chand), a young Indian-American boy who’s quickly emerging as a top contender, no thanks to his neglectful father. Later, the sleuthing Jenny conducts a clandestine background check on Trilby that reveals his true motivations, but threatens to push their increasingly strained relationship to the breaking point.
In the opening scenes of Bad Words, Trilby openly admits to making impulsive, irrational decisions based on anger. Given the vitriol that he frequently hurls at women and children, there’s never any doubt as to how deep his fury runs, only at whom it’s primarily directed. That early confession is a rarity since we learn precious little about Trilby from his own mouth. However repellant he may be on the surface, that mystery makes him fascinating. Of course, whether or not you’ll want to spend your quality time with a character who has no qualms about getting a ten-year-old boy liquored up or sending a preadolescent girl running from the stage in tears may depend largely on your ability to put your morals in a box for 89 minutes, but for those with a big enough box and a strong enough lock, Bad Words offers a wealth of deeply offensive, devil-may-care belly laughs that leave a refreshing sting—the kind that reminds you that not all films are made by a committee or test-marketed to death before they reach the viewer.
Working from a fearless screenplay by freshman scribe Andrew Dodge, Bateman makes a commendable directorial debut that reveals just how much he learned during his three decades in television. Though his direction can sometimes feel a bit pedestrian, in the sense that Bad Words occasionally looks more like a television pilot than a richly cinematic feature, he manages to keep the story moving and the laughs flowing. He handles reaction shots in particular with frame-by-frame precision (hardly a surprise given his background as a straight man), and that’s only a small component of his perfect understanding of the rhythms of comic timing. Likewise, his playful interpretation of Dodge’s farcical characters prevents Bad Words from ever feeling like it’s trying too hard. It can be argued that some of the characters (including our antihero and his young pal, the latter played by a rising talent we’ll surely be seeing more of) are broadly drawn, but Bad Words is first and foremost a comedy—not a biting satire of the spelling-bee industry or a deep meditation on the importance of father figures (though those particular themes are present and accounted for). Even when the plot gives way to some guarded sentiment, the film never loses its unrepentant mean streak. Considering Trilby’s opening remarks, those who emerge from Bad Words foaming with outrage can’t say they were never warned, only that they allowed their morbid curiosity to get the best of them.