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Edward Zwick’s “Pawn Sacrifice” features a talented cast with the likes of Toby Maguire, Liev Schreiber, and Peter Sarsgaard. However, unlike other films with such a captivating storyline, it falls flat as it tries to cover the drama of the cerebral face-off between chess grandmasters Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. The film certainly has highlights but it is much sadder to look at it as a drama.
This subject is indeed exciting, which is likely the reason it is offered in the form of documentaries. Liz Garbus sets out to document in her ‘Bobby Fischer Against the World’ a non-fiction film which has been widely praised. Some events from real life are far more compelling when put together in a motion picture and Zwick’s film makes perfect sense when posing the question of why any audience would care about the match more than 40 years ago.
With regard to the age of the audience, that is likely to change. Zwick uses large, and perhaps excessive, portions from American network coverage of the Fischer-Spassky match in Iceland, footage that to baby boomers might be able to evoke some nostalgia in them, considering how the match was covered as more than just a sporting event but a clash of the ideologies of the US and the Soviet Union. However, for younger filmgoers who lack memory of the Cold War, these same ancient newsreels may make a much more powerful impression.
Appropriately, Steven Knight’s screenplay gives the impression of the biopic by tackling life in the first flashback and progressing through the second. In the starting hours of the film, the audience is treated to the carefully rehearsed parts of Fischer’s life with Bobby, portrayed as a child. He is also gifted a flamboyant supporter of the US, a Women’s Movement activist who he grows up with who refuses to divulge his true identity. Instead, she assumes him to be a skilled chess player in the making and thus teaches him to play.
One of the most notable peculiarities of this part of the film is that it claims to be set in New York, but when we view an outdoor chess meeting labelled ‘Washington Square Park’, it is quite clearly NOT that famous landmark. Of course, there is an understanding that many films shot within the US, but produced with budget constraints, are filmed in Canada, but then why not take away the label and have the audience just assume this is some other park? Either way, Montreal here is not only New York but even more ridiculously, Santa Monica.
Speaking of the latter, this is where Fischer (now Maguire) fights his first war with the Russian chess master Spassky (Schreiber). For now, we already know that the young and arrogant aspiring champion is already a household name, and with the assistance of his lawyer Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg) and the Catholic priest William Lombardy (Sarsgaard), who turned out to be his teacher, is already on his chosen path in life.
As Zwick does for the rest of the film, he bundles Fischer’s journey to California in the late 60s with visual tropes that are as cliche as they come. There is a lot of grainy footage of surfers and their chicks relaxing on the beaches, and a full montage of sun ‘n’ fun activities, none of which are related to the already indoor chess competition. For me, the most cringe-inducing moment is when the filmmakers try to periodize everything by blasting period rock ‘n’ roll hits on the soundtrack. Even fans of this music are likely to agree that it has been overused in films.
Regardless, ‘gobs of pep’ does not assist in speeding up the slow and tedious processes of chess. Rather oddly, Zwick does not even provide footage of the Santa Monica match between Fischer and Spassky where Zwick simply gives the audience the result. This is very dramatic for me: Fischer, the loser, screams incomprehensibly while his captain perplexedly strolls out of an early morning swim.
When the film’s second half begins and we move to Iceland, we understand that Fischer is a complete nutcase. However, viewers of the film may take some relief from this revelation of Fischer’s personality as it helps to justify some of the climactic match’s entertainment value. Even with the knowledge that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are observing the match in the White House, and that there are many other aspects of the match that are unduly important in terms of world politics (and there are plenty of those), along with the painfully spoon-fed manner in which the matches are unduly intricate and blurry, there is some hilarity in witnessing Fischer demand that the game be relocated to a small, quiet rec room, away from the distracting rouse of the larger hall, which to say the least, is a bit of madness that leads the more favored Spassky to lose his cool.
At this point in his life, Fischer (who was ethnically Jewish) had delved into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that unfortunately clouded his public image for long after his time in the sport had passed. Much like Zwick and his associates, who did nothing to account for this unconventional mania, “Pawn Sacrifice” certainly summons the experience, mainly because of the film’s strongest point, Maguire’s performance, who is edgy and magnetic.
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