![]() |
Liev Schreiber and Tobey Maguire recreate Spassky/Fischer in Ed Zwick's pointless chess drama |
The film opens with Fischer trashing his apartment in search
for bugs on the eve of the 1972 final before flashing back in time. You’d
expect the film to give us an idea of what bought our “hero” to this point. Zwick’s
film utterly fails to do this. Now Fischer – very well played by an
aggressively prickly Tobey Maguire – was a hugely troubled man. Though never
formally diagnosed some combination of paranoia, OCD and a myriad other
personality problems meant he was never more than a step away from
self-destruction. Despite this he was deeply driven by an ambition to be the
best chess player in the world. Its rich material, but the film never begins to
get to grips with Fischer.
Could this be because it wants to tell an uplifting story –
the film is really building towards the standing ovation Spassky gives Fischer
in game 6 at the 1972 championship when Fischer whipped him in about 40 moves
of perfect play – but is struggling with the fact that Fischer himself is
deeply unsympathetic. A paranoid conspiracy freak who even by the standards of
the 1960s was an aggressive, virulent anti-Semite (Fischer would later match
Mel Gibson in his anti-Semitic tirades, blaming Zionism for everything from
9/11 down). A bully who refused to interact with anything except on his
own terms, who cut all friends and family from his life for the most minor transgressions.
There is no insight given here at all, or suggestion of what was wrong
with Fischer.
It’s hard to hang a “triumph against the odds” structure –
as Zwick’s unimaginative and conventional film tries to – around this. A far more
interesting film would have used the 1972 tournament as an Act 2 triumph and
then explored in more depth Fischer’s long spiral of self-destruction that
would see him as a bearded eccentric ranting against Jews and America, in exile
in Iceland. A film like that would also have then been able to properly do service
to the idea of Fischer as a pawn of American state interests, who celebrate him
when they want to rub the Soviet nose in it, but then drop him as soon as his
purpose is served.
Instead, the film becomes formulaic and empty, leaving us
with the impression that we learn nothing about Fischer at all. Why did this
man of Jewish descent hate Jewish people so much? Was it self-loathing? What
motivated him to seemingly self-destruct his own career so regularly? Was it a
fear of being beaten? We have no idea. Instead that opening scene of Fischer
destroying his apartment tells us everything we learn about the man over the
course of the film. He remains an enigma – and since he’s also deeply unpleasant
(the film skirts a little around how much) and we don’t get given any rich material
to understand why he’s like this, he becomes a tedious figure to spend time
with.
Zwick’s film also fails to communicate the cold war
motivations behind this. Although there are the odd shots of the powers-that-be
watching on TV in the Kremlin and the White House, we get no sense of how or
why these powers are using chess to promote their own ideology. The film is
endlessly reliable on vintage and reconstructed newsreel footage to constantly
tell us directly things it can’t work out how to do with dialogue, from the
political situation to chess moves. You learn nothing about the Cold War from
this film. Michael Stuhlbarg’s lawyer turned promoter for Fischer states openly
that he wants to use Fischer to show up the Russkies – but that blunt statement
is it.
Instead the film is only really interesting when it is
effectively recreating footage from the 1972 championship. And when a film’s
strong points are recreating real events perfectly, you know you are in
trouble. Zwick’s film lacks ideas, a compelling plot, insight or invention. It
suffers badly today when compared to the far more dynamic and insightful The
Queen’s Gambit (whose lead character is a heavily fictionalised female
Fischer). Zwick’s film is him at his plodding, middle-brow worst, presenting a
would-be epic shorn of anything of actual interest of controversy. The only thing
that redeems it are decent performances from Maguire, Sarsgaard and Schreiber.
Otherwise, this is an empty mess that tells you nothing at all about anything. You
could checkmate it in about four moves.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.