A dramatic depiction of ‘WWIII on a chess board’
Pawn Sacrifice (out of 4) Starring Tobey Maguire, Liev Schreiber, Peter Sarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg. Directed by Ed Zwick. Opens Friday at GTA theatres. 116 minutes. PG
The bizarre events of Pawn Sacrifice must seem like some sort of SCTV or Saturday Night Live parody to anyone not old enough to remember them.
In the summer of 1972, as the Cold War and Vietnam War still raged and the Watergate scandal was just simmering, two men started “World War III on a chess board,” to quote a line from Ed Zwick’s movie.
U.S. chess great Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) and Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber) captured the planet’s attention as they fought for the world champion title in a series of games in Reykjavik, Iceland. Called the “Match of the Century” by headline-hungry journalists, it had people who couldn’t tell a rook from a knight — among them U.S. President Richard Nixon — listening to play-by-plays via radio and tracking every painstaking move on the board.
It was an unreal time, fuelled by paranoia and ambition between the two nations and between the volatile Fischer and the stoic Spassky.
Zwick ( Glory, Blood Diamond) and screenwriter Steven Knight ( Locke, Eastern Promises) don’t have a lot to say about the social context of the Fischer-Spassky bout — Watergate and the incipient cult of celebrity are briefly referenced — but they get the particulars mostly right, depicting a pre-Internet world of analog communications, outdated hostilities and chauvinistic intentions.
Archived news reports and a Dick Cavett interview fit seamlessly into the dramatic recreations, as do era-specific rock tunes.
Maguire’s combustible Fischer rings true. He’s a genius at the game but hopeless at personal relationships, and reluctant to embrace the narrative of his lawyer/wrangler Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg), who wants to push him as “the poor kid from Brooklyn against the whole Soviet empire. The perfect American story.”
Schreiber’s simmering Spassky also fits the taciturn man of memory. There’s a comic moment on a Santa Monica beach where, surrounded by dark-suited bodyguards, Spassky meets by chance a dishevelled and wild-eyed Fischer, who taunts, “I’m coming to get you!”
The film’s most interesting performance and character, however, is Peter Sarsgaard’s Father Bill Lombardy, a Roman Catholic priest and chess grandmaster who coached Fischer during the 1972 matches.
Eclipsed by the grander characters at the time, and also neglected by Liz Garbus’ 2011 doc Bobby Fischer Against the World, he emerges here as an astute and caring witness to history and madness.
He’s the audience surrogate for a crazy time when super power antagonists chose to fight a global conflict on the chess board rather than the battlefield.