Movie Review: 'Pawn Sacrifice'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Bobby Fischer: In the 1960s and 1970s, his household name was synonymous with brilliance and eccentricty.
Chess was his calling, his passion, his obsession, his profession. And nobody in the United States could challenge him. But what about the Russians, with their decades-long domination of the "sport"?
Pawn Sacrifice is a biographical docudrama and character study that focuses on the competition for the World Championship of chess – the Match of the Century, it was dubbed -- that occurred in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972, during the height of the Cold War, when it came to represent a lot more than a mere chess match between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
Tobey Maguire stars as iconic chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer, the kid from Brooklyn who would go on to become a tortured checkmating genius.
Liev Schreiber plays the cool and confident Boris Spassky, the Soviet Union's greatest chess player, whom Fischer would take on in this politically metaphoric tournament, while Peter Sarsgaard as a chess-playing priest and Michael Stuhlbarg as his patriotic lawyer are Fischer's handlers, trainers, and Bobbysitters, and Robin Weigert and Lily Rabe play fatherless Fischer's activist mother and devoted sister, respectively.
There's certainly nothing cinematic about chess, but director Edward Zwick (Glory, Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond, Love & Other Drugs) manages to keep us from noticing or remembering that not by ignoring the head-to-head competition, but by shooting and editing the match sequences in such a way that movie viewers are not subjected to the dead spots that viewers of the actual matches were surely subjected to.
Wisely, Zwick – working from a screenplay by Steven Knight, from a story by Knight, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson -- doesn't even try to explain the particulars of the employed chess maneuvers in the key matches, which he undoubtedly realizes would only register with a tiny percentage of his audience.
Speaking of that spectating group, they are watching a fascinating but not overwhelmingly engaging confrontation, with their allegiance to the country Fischer represents perhaps providing them a rooting interest. However, if they root for the arrogant and antisocial Fischer as an individual, it's not because of his personality, but in spite of it.
Because appealing Fischer is not. Yet this work is as fine as anything Maguire, who is also credited as a producer, has done, as he gives us this lifelong paranoid, grimly determined, unpredictably volatile, and impossibly demanding prodigy as he copes with his own ineluctable mental deterioration.
And Maguire resists the inevitable temptation to soften the edges of the protagonist portrait in the name of likability. He simply and admirably disappears into the role.
As far as the chess-playing footage goes, it's handled in a way that rewards those who know and play the game, but without disenfranchising those unfamiliar with the pieces and moves and tactics and strategies.
So we'll check 3 stars out of for 4 for Pawn Sacrifice, an engrossing chess psychodrama that makes most of the right moves.
