In that year, he was memorably caught up in Cold War tensions between America and Russian Federation when he challenged and defeated the Soviet chess champion Boris Spassky in a match that many consider the greatest ever played. But there is, of course, an irresistible urge to see the dramatization of actual events, especially involving someone as nuttily charismatic as Fischer.
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Tobey Maguire, best known for the gentle and introspective roles, did an outstanding job portraying the role of Bobby Fischer, an imperious and eccentric chess genius in “Pawn Sacrifice“. He’s also realistic enough to know that beneath Fischer’s manias is a formidable foe. But thanks to Zwick’s precise direction and camera work, and a taut script from Steven Knight (with story credit to Knight, Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson), this doesn’t play like a typical Hollywood biopic at all, but rather a snapshot in time that tells you more about who Fischer really was than any linear telling of his life could possibly do. His politically active mother, Regina, was a suspected Communist under Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance who taught her son “there are bad people in the world who want to intimidate us”.
When the chaos of his environment threatens to overwhelm, younger Bobby turns to chess, a recreation he taught himself at age 6, enjoying out matches in his head to calm himself. I would note also Michael Stuhlbarg as Fischer’s lawyer and Peter Sarsgaard as the priest who became his confidante and “chess whisperer”.
A major obstruction was not only the skill of individual USSR players like Spassky and Mikhail Botvinnik but also the superior gamesmanship of the Soviet team, strategies that lone wolf Fischer denounced as “unfair, unjust, immoral” after he is denied victory in 1962’s World Team Olympics at Varna, Bulgaria.
Gail Katz, Maguire and Zwick are the producers. First to arrive is Paul Marshall (“A Serious Man’s” Stuhlbarg), a successful music business attorney. Particularly memorable is a scene on the Santa Monica sand the place the apoplectic American screams on the baffled Russian, “I am coming after you”.
A smart, intelligent and fascinating movie in every way, director Ed Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice makes all the right moves in this intensely watchable, sort-of biopic of the great chess grand master Bobby Fischer.
By this level, one other impediment in Fischer’s method has develop into clear: His paranoid, at occasions anti-Semitic delusions have gained in power and his connection to actuality has grow to be more and more tenuous.
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But, as somebody says, “out of all of the craziness come video games of such unimaginable magnificence”. Chess is not just a game; “Pawn Sacrifice” isn’t just a movie.
