Cold War kid

Bobby Fischer may have been the greatest chess player who ever lived, but chess isn’t exactly the most spellbinding of spectator sports. It’s remarkable, then, that director Ed Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice is as good as it is.

Maybe it helps if you were around in 1972 and can remember the hoopla that attended Fischer’s match against world champion Boris Spassky in Iceland. The match between the cool Soviet champ Spassky and the prickly American Fischer was one of those skirmishes that pitted East against West on a bloodless Cold War battlefield. It’s no spoiler to disclose that Fischer beat Spassky decisively, only to forfeit his title three years later when he refused to defend it against a fresh Soviet challenge.

So much for background. Zwick’s movie, from Steven Knight’s script, opens in the midst of that 1972 match, as Fischer dismantles the phone in his rented Reykjavik house, obsessed with the idea that the Russians are messing with his head. Then it flashes back 20 years, to where the child Bobby (Aiden Lovekamp) lives in Brooklyn with a mother (Robin Weigert) who speaks in radical slogans and may be under surveillance by the FBI as a suspected communist. Is this surveillance real, and the root of Bobby’s paranoia? The movie plants the idea without saying.

Bobby takes refuge in chess. He’s a genuine prodigy, and by the time he’s grown old enough to be played by Tobey Maguire, he’s a prominent world player. He also accuses the Soviets of gaming the tournament system to keep him from challenging their supremacy. The shifty-eyed Russians who hover in the background certainly seem capable of it, but again the movie lays out the idea yet doesn’t say.

Finally, Bobby gains two valuable allies. One is Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg), a music industry lawyer and “patriotic American” who says he can help Bobby pursue his goal. Is Marshall covertly supported by the CIA or State Department? Yet again, the movie doesn’t say, perhaps wisely: Marshall is (or was) a real person and he (or his heirs) might take umbrage at anything more definite.

The other ally is Father Bill Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard), a grandmaster who agrees to coach Bobby (in real life, Lombardy had known Bobby since childhood). Together the two men keep Bobby on track—Marshall greasing the skids, Lombardy discussing chess on something like Bobby’s level and massaging his psyche as needed.

The movie’s centerpiece is the match itself, skillfully pitting Maguire’s jittery, hyper Bobby against the businesslike composure (and graciousness in defeat) of Liev Schreiber’s Boris Spassky.

In a way, it’s ironic that a player as unconventional as Fischer should be the subject of such a thoroughly conventional biopic, but we can’t all be geniuses: professionalism has its upside too. As Fischer, Tobey Maguire gives us the man’s mercurial rage and twitchiness. His big teddy-bear eyes can’t quite match the real Bobby’s vulpine stare, but that may work in the movie’s favor; this Bobby is far more sympathetic than the raving anti-Semitic the real Bobby became.

The last we hear is the real Fischer, raving about how America discarded him once the Cold War was over. Do Knight and Zwick endorse this view of the aging, unhinged Bobby? Again, they lay it out there but they don’t say.