Whiz Kids
Directed by Tom Shepard
Co-Director: Tina DiFeliciantonio
Written and Edited by Jane C. Wagner
***

Growing up, I was never what you’d call a science whiz.  I was interested in the subject sure, but didn’t have a real aptitude for it.  In high school, biology and chemistry class were the twin banes of my existence and I never bothered to try my hand at senior-year physics.  The pattern repeated itself in college, where I made sure to find the least intensive science courses possible to fulfill those credit requirements.  (In my freshman year, I did take a chance and enrolled in a cosmology course only to drop it after barely being able to answer a single question on the first exam.)  Even though science isn’t my field, I’ve always had an admiration for the folks that do find pleasure and passion in it, because those are the people who are really going to be changing the world while the rest of us enjoy the benefits of their accomplishments.

Tom Shepard and Tina DiFelciantonio’s documentary Whiz Kids, which chronicles a year in the lives of three teenage scientists, arrives in theaters an appropriate time as 2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for non-fiction films that investigate America’s troubled educational system.  Perhaps the most high profile of these is Davis Guggenheim’s already controversial Waiting for Superman, which premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival and arrives in theaters in the fall, probably right around the time that schools re-open their doors.  Other docs in this vein include The Cartel, which opened in limited release in the spring, and The Lottery, which will be playing around the country this summer.  In general, these films focus on the hot-button issues facing the country’s schools, including overcrowded classrooms, deep budget cuts and the role of the teachers’ union.  It’s important, but deeply depressing stuff, which makes Whiz Kids a nice antidote to the general atmosphere of doom and gloom featured in Waiting for Superman and its ilk.  Without entirely discounting the problems our schools face (a pre-credits note points out that American students rank significantly behind the rest of the world in math and science) Shepard and DiFeliciantonio single out three students who have made the most of their educational opportunities and demonstrate an active love of learning both in and out of the classroom.

In the tradition of the 2002 spelling-bee documentary Spellbound, which has improbably turned out to be one of the most influential docs of the past decade, the narrative arc of Whiz Kids is centered around an important competition that the film’s subjects are all jostling for a place in.  The specific event is Intel’s annual Science Talent Search, a six-decade old competition that accepts research projects from high-school seniors around the country.  The thousands of entries are eventually whittled down to a group of forty finalists who are then brought to Washington D.C. for an intensive interview and presentation process.  All finalists receive a significant contribution to their college fund, but only the last teen scientist standing walks away with the $100,000 grand prize.  The three teens profiled in Whiz Kids were all competing for a slot in the 2007 Science Talent Search (look for a brief cameo by then-Senator Barack Obama at the meet-and-greet portion of the event); two of them were among the finalists and one didn’t make the cut.  But don’t worry, I wouldn’t dream of giving away the identity of the unlucky person that didn’t get to go to the nation’s capital.

Much like the judges in the Science Talent Search, Shepard and DiFeliciantonio must have had to wade through a number of candidates before deciding which whiz kids would be featured in their documentary.  Fortunately, they picked the right three teens.  The entertaining and diverse crew includes Kelydra Welcker, an environmental scientist from West Virginia; Ana Cisneros, a botanist from Long Island; and Harmain Khan, a paleontologist from Staten Island.  Despite their young age, each of these teens had already achieved significant accomplishments by the time the filmmakers discovered them.  Kelydra, for example, invented a way to rid her hometown’s drinking water of containments that were being dumped into it by local Dupont factories.  Harmain, meanwhile, had been pursuing an ambitious project involving crocodile teeth and Ana flew to a Colorado university to help a professor with an important experiment.  All three were entering Intel’s Talent Search not simply for their love of science, but also because they needed the money in order to attend college, another unfortunate reality too many talented students face.

All three kids are disarmingly charming and ambitious, which means that the directors don’t have to work very hard to get you rooting for them to succeed.  And while the details of their individual projects aren’t explored in as much depth as they perhaps could be, their enthusiasm for their research is always palpable.  It’s almost a shame that the Science Talent Search dominates so much of the narrative; I was happiest simply watching these teens in their element, testing hypothesis and checking data.  Part of that is also due to my fatigue with the Spellbound school of documentaries, where everything often comes down to winning and losing.  Since teen scientists need all the encouragement they can get if this country ever hopes to catch up to the rest of the world, it seems a shame to put them in a situation where they feel as if their hard work has been in vain if they don’t walk away with a check for $100,000.  (Then again, if any of these kids do pursue science as a career–and a postscript reveals that at least one has moved on to a more lucrative field of study–they’ll always be competing for money to fund their research, so I guess that the Science Talent Search is a useful training ground in that way.)  With all the challenges facing the country’s educational system, Whiz Kids reminds us that our schools are filled with students that are desperately eager to learn.  Here’s hoping we’ll be able to meet their needs.

Whiz Kids is open in limited release in New York.  Visit the official website to learn about upcoming showings.