‘Pawn Sacrifice’ – Review
By Vaughan Grey

One of the most tricky genres to evaluate for me has always been the traditional Hollywood bio pic. Sure, they might feature good performances and assured art direction, but the basic three act structure of the conventional studio film demands the same basic rhetoric: the real-life hero (usually a male) defies convention impressively with his talent, suffers setbacks, then rises again to defeat whatever real-life antagonist the screenwriter decided to focus on at a particular time in his life before succumbing to real-life defeat. So, while Edward Zwick’s new film, Pawn Sacrifice, doesn’t exactly transcend any of those conventions in its examination of the late chess genius/paranoid crackpot Bobby Fischer during a week in 1974 when he was put up against a Russian world chess champion, it certainly puts on a good enough spectacle to make you forget that.

For those unfamiliar with history, Bobby Fischer was, and probably still is, the greatest human chess player of the 20th century, and maybe 21st, if not ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if his records are only broken by a computer/robot chess player one day. That being said, as a person, he was a total wreck on the level of Howard Hughes, riddled with paranoia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism, inspite of his anti-Communism stance. A likable bio pic character like Stephen Hawking (who also had his dislikable side that The Theory of Everything skillfully hid from the audience) he was not. Knowing that, it is not a total shock Hollywood waited this long to make a mainstream film about him after his 2008 death in Iceland. The two documentaries (so far) that have been produced about him, A Requiem for Bobby Fischer and Bobby Fischer Against the World go into greater detail about the complicated life he led, while the 2009 indie film, Bobby Fischer Live, remains largely unseen. Amd, of course, his symbolic prescence in 1992’s Seaching for Bobby Fischer didn’t count for much since it wasn’t really about him.

In Pawn Sacrifice, he is portrayed by Toby Maquire (and as a child by Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick and Aiden Lovekamp). Sure, Mr. Maquire looks nothing like him and is noticeably shorter and less intimidating than Mr. Fischer was in real life (Not that this has ever stopped someone like Tom Cruise from playing anything. Bobby Fischer actually looked more like Pablo Schreiber during this time), but he inhabits the character beautifully from the inside out. Not to be outdone, his chosen opponent in the film is Liev Schreiber playing the Russian chess (and then world) champion, Boris Spassky. Mr. Schreiber gives a grandiose interior performance. Both are performances worthy of award attention.
One of the biggest surprises of Pawn Sacrifice is that Edward Zwick, a director known more for his sweeping, halcyon epic films like Glory, Courage Under Fire, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond, was able to derive any suspense out of a high-stakes, yet completely predictable, chess match (granted, one that represented the palpable Cold War-era tensions between Russia and the USA at that time) where one player demanded to perform in a ping pong room for most of it and the other had his chair x-rayed. Stephen Knight’s follow-up script to his one-two punch of Locke and The Hundred-Foot Journey (I’ll forgive Seventh Son) skillfully cherry picks the events from this short period of Mr. Fischer’s remarkable life in an attempt to define his entire existence. We learn he was mercurial, difficult, out-of-touch, spoiled by success, and possibly delusional and autistic (his exact mental illness is never defined here, much to the story’s detriment). To compensate for this shocking lack of subtext, the rich cinematography by Bradford Young, uplifting sore by James Newton Howard, and precise editing by Steven Rosenblum provide a more cohesive and pleasing presentation than the unsympathetic Fischer probably ever deserved. I was surprised to see that he seemed to have no personal life outside of chess matches and political rants, as shown by his strange, short-lived relationship with an underwritten Santa Monica prostitute named Donna, who is well-played by Evelyne Brochu.

This leads to the film’s biggest problem aside from its predictability in that the female characters in Mr. Fischer’s life are so one-dimensional, they might as well not be there at all. Aside from the aforementioned Donna, Lily Rabe is basically wasted as Joan Fischer and Robin Weigert is not given much else to do as his mother but look worried for him, even after he unceremoniously throws her out of his life. Like most bio pics, the hero is given multiple father figures. Here they are played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Peter Sarsgaard. It is not a surprise they are the ones that come off as three-demensional characters.
Thankfully, this is one conventional bio pic that doesn’t conclude with a sentimental wedding or relationship mea culpa of any kind. That wasn’t Bobby Fischer’s style. He lived through neurosis and triumph and that is tolerated here. And though Pawn Sacrifice essentially sacrifices the later drama of Bobby’s globe-trotting while running from the American law later on in his life (which I would’ve preferred see than any important chess match), the film creates a too-comfortable microcosm where the ambition to simaltaneously crystallize and humanize the insanity, celebrity, and cultural impact of his genius in a one week span exceeds its grasp. Let me know when a cable channel like HBO produces a less conventional and more comprehensive mini-series on him.