“Pawn Sacrifice” (2015, directed by Edward Zwick) is a
biography of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, with a certain emphasis on the events
leading up to the 1972 World Championship chess match in Iceland (link), including the way the US government (according to the film) politicized the
match as a proxy for the Cold War, as if that explained all of Bobby’s
eccentric, boorish behavior.
Tobey Maguire, now 40, seems a little soft physically
compared to the real-life Fischer at the time, and his performance makes
Fischer’s antics seem even more problematical. But even Boris Spassky (Liev
Schreiber) pulled some antics of his own.
The movie does not generate real suspense, and the effect is
to provoke a sense of hysteria, rather than real rooting interest, or real
intrigue into the game itself. But it is
hard to present chess as a sport to a “mainstream” audience.
The chess in the actual match is remarkable. Fischer pitched
a piece in a drawn ending in the first game with a beginner’s mistake, although
he thought he saw a phantom way to extract the Bishop.
The second game Bobby (making ridiculous
complaints about playing conditions) forfeited, and then Spassky gave in to
Fischer’s demands for political reasons and allowed the match to continue,
after which Fischer relentlessly outplayed him, winning four times with the
Black pieces, not always choosing the soundest openings.
In fact, Fischer had been known for a rather transparent
view of the openings, preferring King’s Pawn for White, almost as a political
statement against emerging Soviet theory favoring Queen pawn opening for White
(especially in the 1960s, when I was entering the world of tournament chess
myself) – predicated on the idea that many Queenside openings allow White to
keep the tension in the center longer.
Game 6 was famous because Fischer pulled a surprise, playing a White
side of a Queen’s Gambit, for which Spassky was not well prepared, and
whereupon Spassky made a serious error
at the start of the middle game, leading to his being crushed positionally. This
has been called one of the greatest games ever played, compared to a Yankee victory
over the Red Sox to end the 1978 baseball season and secure a Yankee pennant as
the greatest baseball game ever.
I’ve often written on social media that baseball and football
managers, and especially pitchers and quarterbacks, should learn to play
chess. A few of the Washington Nationals
players have read my comments.
Peter Sarsgaard is gentle as Father William Lombardy,
Fischer’s coach and a popular grandmaster at the time, often analyzing games in
the United States Chess Federation’s magazine.
I was particularly active myself in chess while in grad
school and in the Army, and later in the early 1980s when living in
Dallas. The highest rating I ever got
was short of 2000, as I was erratic, sometimes beating 2300 players but losing
to 1400 players. Upsets were common in
my games, and Black won as often as White. Blunders happen, just as they do in
major pro sports.
The film concludes with a quick synopsis of Fischer’s
deterioration in his later years, including needing to seek asylum from the US
and live in Iceland until his 2008 death after traveling illegally to play in a
sanctioned country.
The official site is here.
I saw the movie Friday afternoon at the Angelika Mosaic
theater before a fair weekday audience.
A comparison film could be “Searching for Bobby Fischer”
(1993) by Steven Zaillian (Paramount).
Bill
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