I’ve never been all that big into the game of chess. Sure I know the rules and all that, but I’ve never really have had any urge to learn how to play it. I admire it a lot as a game of strategy and do find it minimally interesting, but it’s just not a game I’d ever be willing to learn how to get good at. I was somewhat interested by the trailer of Pawn Sacrifice although it wasn’t just because it was about chess, but because it is about that as well as the Cold War and mental illness. Those are three combinations that come together in this movie to make what turns out to be a pretty cool character study and interesting event in history.
Pawn Sacrifice is about a chess prodigy named Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) who becomes the U.S.’s best chance for beating Russia in chess. For years the Soviet Union had dominated at the chess world championship and Bobby was the first American player in years who had any hope of beating the Soviet Union’s winning streak. The current champion at the time was a really good chess player named Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber). The only problem with Bobby challenging Spassky is the fact that he was thought to be mentally ill and although he was a very good chess player he also found himself caught in the middle of the cold war which never really interested him and instead took on a very odd antisemitism view which was ironic considering he was Jewish.
Most people only think of Tobey Maguire as the guy who played Spider-man in those first three Spider-man movies. I can’t really blame anyone for that because it is what he is most famous for. At 40 years old now though I think Maguire has matured into a very good actor and I think he really shows that off here. He has a very decent thick Brooklyn accent and a lot of the time I forgot that I was even watching Tobey Maguire. He pulls of what every actor tries to do in a bio-pic movie and that is disappear into the character. I also really enjoyed the performance of Peter Sarsgaard who plays the Fischer’s training partner William Lombardy. Sarsgaard’s character is one that we can really latch onto especially when it is hard to root for Maguire’s character due to the rock star entitlement he has along with over the top antisemitism views. Sarsgaard’s character is also used very well by explaining certain chess moves made by Fischer to Fischer’s manager which is mostly done for the audiences benefit. I don’t always like it when a movie holds the hand of the audience although I think it works here due to how complicated strategies in chess can be. I also really enjoyed Liev Schreiber who speaks Russian for the entire movie and really seems to go all in with his character. I don’t think Schreiber gets enough credit a lot of the time and it is nice to see him in bigger roles like this one.
There is a lot to like about this movie although I had quite a few problems with how it was edited. There were times throughout the movie where Fischer is about to play an important chess game and it kind of just skips over it. I’m okay with that to a point and I feel in some ways it is use for dramatic effect, but it also seemed just a bit too jarring. There is one part where it looks like they are going to show him playing all these Russian characters and it just skips to the finals and it takes a bit to realize that he already played the games and won due to the fact that the movie skips ahead. Despite the awkward editing I did enjoy the direction of the movie. It was a very interesting looking movie that a lot of the time shot in different styles based on the 1960s and 1970s eras that it was taking place in. There is one scene though that I didn’t exactly like. It features Maguire as Fischer appearing on the Dick Cavett Show and they pretty much just inserted Maguire into the actual interview footage using special effects. That may have looked cool and new twenty-one years ago in Forrest Gump, but in this it looked very shoddy.
Pawn Sacrifice comes from director Edward Zwick and although he may not be the most prolific director he does have a very good track record with movies like Glory (1989) and Blood Diamond (2006). This movie has a very interesting character in Fischer who was a very polarizing character and I felt that the movie portrayed him in probably the fairest way it could. I really like movies with interesting characters especially when there is an interesting story around that character. The chess scenes could have been boring, but they figured out ways to fill them with tension and make them as interesting as you can make a chess match.
Dave’s Rating- ★★★★(4) out of ★★★★★(5)
