In fact, the entire cast makes this movie for grownups brilliantly acted.
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However identical to the actual Fischer survived and prospered for some time due to his loyal help workforce, the nuanced work of top-notch costars Peter Sarsgaard, Liev Schreiber and Michael Stuhlbarg retains issues balanced when Maguire’s efficiency will get too unhinged for its personal good. And with “Pawn Sacrifice”, it served as an impressive and inspiring addition to the Fischer film collection. The film’s thesis, that Fischer’s sweeping paranoia was the product of the era’s fearmongering and the kind of absolute myopia necessitated by chess, is perhaps too elegant and simplistic to be fully convincing, but director Edward Zwick’s decision to present Fischer’s life as a political thriller remains perversely engrossing. The match was halted several times as Fischer demanded more money – and, at one point, a change of venue to a pingpong room. His politically lively mom, Regina, was a suspected Communist beneath Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance who taught her son “there are risky individuals on the planet who need to intimidate us”.
Hoping to discourage the boy from such frivolity by exposing him to raised gamers, his mom takes him to a chess membership, however the reverse occurs.
In 1956, at the age of 12, Fischer became a National Master.
In 1972, the the volatile New Yorker earns the right to face the Russian veteran in the hotly anticipated “Match of the Century”, a 21 game competition in Reykjavik, Iceland, that could end 24 years of Soviet domination of the World Chess Championship. But I have to say, I was on the edge of my seat watching this movie. It is about the Cold War, hegemony of the Russians and an American unsettling everything.
The Bobby Fischer biopic Pawn Sacrifice seems to have been made not because someone had insight into the chess champion’s character, but because someone realized Bobby Fischer was famous but didn’t have a biopic yet.
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Yet, as someone says, “out of all the craziness come games of such unimaginable beauty”.
