One of the challenges for director Edward Zwick in Pawn Sacrifice (2015) is that he was making a movie about a board game where the main character is not very sympathetic. But Zwick lives up to the challenge, with the movie recounting chess genius Bobby Fischer’s rise to prominence and chess champion, while also showing Fischer’s struggles with paranoia and mental illness.
Pawn Sacrifice begins with a short scene of Fischer, played by Tobey Maguire, at the 1972 world championship against Russian Grandmaster Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber). And then it takes us back to Fischer as a child with a growing fascination with chess. The movie then follows the chess prodigy as he rises to the championship stage, revealing Fischer’s mental problems and the importance of his game for Americans and Soviets during the Cold War era.
The movie does an excellent job telling the story of this piece of American history, while giving some insight into Fischer. For me, I wanted to know more about the man beneath the chess and the madness, but the movie instead focuses on the link between the latter two without much deviation from that path.
Similarly, even though Pawn Sacrifice follows the real-life history pretty well and does a good job at getting the story right, one also may gain insight from Liz Garbus’s excellent documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011). That documentary retraces much of the same story using real footage.
Yet, a dramatized movie can take us places that a documentary cannot. And Pawn Sacrifice is at its best in the little moments, such as when Schreiber shows a human side of Spassky and when we see Fischer’s interactions with lawyer Paul Marshal (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a chess-playing priest friend Fr. Bill Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard). It is these interactions that made the movie for me and made me wish for more about Marshal and Lombardy.
Ultimately, Pawn Sacrifice is an interesting and entertaining movie for anyone interested in the 1970s and the sad story of Bobby Fischer. Rotten Tomatoes gives Pawn Sacrifice a 72% critics rating and a 75% audience rating.
Bonus Bobby Fischer: If after seeing Pawn Sacrifice you are in the mood for another movie about chess, check out the excellent movie Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), which is not about Fischer but another real-life childhood chess prodigy, Joshua Waitzkin. Finally, for another perspective on Bobby Fischer, check out this appearance with Bob Hope not long after Fischer won the world championship.
What did you think of Pawn Sacrifice? Leave your two cents in the comments.
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