Plot

Wife and mother Miriam begins a downward emotional spiral as her husband avoids their collapsing marriage by immersing himself in his 11-year-old daughter's quest to become a spelling-bee champion.

The Naumanns of Oakland, California are outwardly a loving, supportive family. Husband and father Saul is a Religious Studies professor who looks to his religious training in Judaism as tenets by which to raise his family and has high expectations for all of them. His midteen son Aaron idolizes his father and does everything to please him. His preteen daughter Eliza often feels neglected. So when Saul learns that Eliza is participating and excelling in spelling bees, she becomes the focus of his life as he believes that letters in the form of words will lead to answers to the universe. That change in focus to Eliza makes Aaron feel neglected now, and he strikes out quietly in his own way with help from Chali, a young woman he meets. But the person who has felt the most pressure within Saul's way of life is his wife Miriam, a microbiologist who converted from Catholicism to Judaism when she and Saul married. But as Saul espouses the concept of tikkun olam, bringing together the shards of the world to make it whole, it affects Miriam negatively in trying to cope with an incident from her childhood. Through it all, Eliza might understand her father's way of life the best, and use it in an unexpected way to bring her family back together.—Huggo

In the Naumann household, 11-year-old Eliza (Cross) feels she has little to offer in a family of overachievers. All that changes when she wins a school-wide spelling bee, much to the surprise of everyone. Her newfound gift garners an invitation to the National Spelling Bee. Now her father (Gere), a professor of Judaism, devotes attention to her as fanatically as he does to his religious studies.

11-year-old Eliza Naumann comes from an odd family; they all divert their emotional frustrations into secret channels. When Eliza unexpectedly begins winning spelling bees, what had been a stable dynamic within the family becomes disrupted; long-held secrets emerge, and a latent spiritual yearning is awakened in her withdrawn father Saul and compulsive mother Miriam. As Eliza moves closer and closer to the national spelling bee, the Naumann family finds itself in a spiral of surprising discovery and jarring uncertainty.—J Grimshaw