While portraying tormented chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, Tobey
Maguire delivers a solid performance in Edward Zwick’s effective, if
conventional biopic, “Pawn Sacrifice.” Choosing to focus mostly on Fischer’s
1972 showdown against Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky
(a terrific Liev Schreiber), Zwick and screenwriter
Steven Knight paint Fischer’s early life in broad strokes. We get a CliffsNotes
version of Fischer’s childhood living with his mother (Robin Weigert), whose ties to the Communist party landed their
family on an FBI watch list. Though their relationship is a complicated one,
his mother recognizes Bobby’s talent for chess and finds a teacher, Carmine Nigro (Conrad Pla), to nurture
his gifts. Under his tutelage, Bobby rises through the world of competitive
chess.
At a time
when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are at an all-time
high, Fischer became an unlikely hero for Americans looking to confirm their
country’s superiority during its war of perceptions. Competing against the
seemingly unbeatable Russians, Bobby comes across as a poor, plucky kid from
Brooklyn taking on the whole Soviet empire.
Everything
builds up to the World Chess Championship in ReykjavÃk, Iceland, and Fischer’s
series of matches against the stoic Spassky. Along
the way Bobby receives support from his handlers, including his lawyer and manager,
Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg), and his coach, Bill
Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard, reliably great). Together,
the two men are tasked with keeping him focused and on course. A former chess
champ turned priest, Lombardy seems to have led an interesting enough life to
be the subject of his own film. It’s this section, in which Fischer struggles
to overcome his mental state (and occasionally uses it to his advantage) that
the film is at its taut, nail-biting best.
It’d be easy
for any actor playing Fischer to focus on the more eccentric details. Fischer
suffered from undiagnosed mental illness and at the height of his popularity, he
grew increasingly delusional, demonstrating paranoid behavior and psychosis. He
grows fixated on anti-communist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (the latter
especially ironic considering the fact that Fischer was himself Jewish). Knight
never attempts to explain the source of this behavior, though there is an
interesting discussion between Marshall and Lombardy that tiptoes into a
discussion about whether the obsessive nature of chess attracts those with
mental illness, or causes it. It all seems like a license to overact, but for
the most part Maguire underplays it, making us wonder what’s going on in his
head, a choice that’s particularly effective during the tense chess matches late
in the film.
Fischer is a
compelling figure and his story is a fascinating one, though Zwick often seems
determined to smother it with blunt, by-the-numbers filmmaking. Attempting to
convey Fischer’s erratic mindset, he resorts to shaky, handheld camera moves
and often relies on montages of 16mm faux newsreel footage and obvious musical
cues to function as transitions between the film’s sections. Still, the film’s
depiction of an unusual time in history when the attentions of the entire world
could be focused on the outcome of a chess match is never less than gripping.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 6, 2015.
