“This game… it’s a rabbit hole.” Those are the opening words of the first official trailer for the new movie Pawn Sacrifice, which opens in American cinemas on September 18th this year. The film, starring Tobey Maguire as Bobby Fischer and Liev Schreiber as Boris Spassky, charts Fischer’s rise and fall against the backdrop of the famous 1972 World Chess Championship match in Iceland.
The poster for the cinema release of Pawn Sacrifice | image: Entertainment Weekly
It’s been a long road – in 2009 Steven Knight’s Pawn
Sacrifice script made a Hollywood list of the best unproduced screenplays, in
2010 David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network) was announced as the
director, in 2013 filming actually took place with Edward Zwick taking over, in
2014 it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival and now finally a trailer has been
released ahead of its September premiere:
Although the film covers familiar ground – most recently seen on the big screen in Liz Garbus’ 2011 documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World – it’s unlikely chess fans will mind another retrospective on the career of arguably the most brilliant and enigmatic figure in chess history.
The film features flashbacks to when Fischer was just starting out
What gives the Fischer story wider appeal, of course, is how it chimed with the Cold War atmosphere of the time, with the trailer including the half-cliché of, "a poor kid from Brooklyn against the whole Soviet empire."
Fischer: "I want to play the Russians..."
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly the director explained how Fischer’s international fame was a relatively new phenomenon, describing the American star as “a pre-punk hero”:
Edward Zwick: Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the cold war had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then. But the other thing you have to realize, the idea of international celebrity was relatively new. The Beatles had come to America a couple years before this, and [Fischer] was one of the first, I would call him a pre-punk hero. He was in some ways unruly and he was unpredictable. He was anti-authoritarian in certain ways. He was also kind of stylish and great looking and homegrown, so all of these conspired to give him this cache. We were all aware of him.
Jeff Labreque: Bobby Fischer was all those things, but pardon my language, but he was also an a–hole.
Absolutely. That’s the pre-punk thing. There’s a certain amount of a–holery that came to be a very important part of his character in popular culture.
The task of portraying Fischer from his late teens onwards fell to Tobey Maguire, who shot to stardom by playing the lead role in the Spider-Man trilogy from 2002-2007.
The film shows the match in Reykjavik, but in this first trailer the whole emphasis is on how the crowd and cameras worked on Fischer's nerves
The director explained why Maguire was up to the job:
He has a very particular intensity about him. He has the necessary intelligence and the focus. He’s a research fanatic and had come to know the games and all of the things that [Fischer] had said and people who had known him. So in a way that a great actor can internalize something – something ineffable even – no matter how recognizable they are, after five or 10 minutes, you are watching a story about someone else. You are watching this character rather than watching the movie star. And they are the best kind of movie stars, those who can somehow reimagine themselves before your very eyes.
Maguire’s performance gained some excellent reviews, for instance in the New York Post:
Tobey Maguire does a great job as Fischer in “Pawn Sacrifice,’’ a biopic that covers the wacko chess genius’ life from a budding chess prodigy to the historic match with less eccentric Spassky (a terrific Liev Schreiber). The match was halted several times as Fischer demanded more money and a change of venue to a pingpong room.
Liev Schreiber as Spassky gained most of the plaudits, though, for instance on rogerebert.com:
But "Pawn Sacrifice" truly comes to life when Liev Schreiber swaggers onto the screen as Spassky, the then-reigning top player in the world. He is the rock star to Fischer’s nerdy upstart and, with minimal dialogue and most of it in Russian, the actor makes you believe that, for one brief moment in time, the whole world was caught up in chess fever.
Liev Schreiber as Boris Spassky
The acting is generally admired but the overall verdicts range from solid – “conventionally well-crafted dramatization” (Variety), “a classically helmed biopic that brings nothing new to the genre” (The Hollywood Reporter) – to a few that are much more critical:
Basically, Zwick’s film sets the stage for a brilliant intellectual showdown, then hides away its content, as if worried he’s going to scare us off with too much chess. He castles and fritters away his pieces, angling for a dull draw. (The Telegraph)
There’s little doubt the film's release is going to be an event for chess fans, though. We all know the story, but it’s something else to watch it unfold. As a voice in the trailer puts it, “Bobby won’t crack… he will explode!” Or take the last words we hear from Bobby himself:
People think there are always options, but in the end there’s no place to go.
Bobby Fischer cutting a lone figure in Iceland, the scene of his greatest triumph and where he died 7 years ago
See also:
Comments 17
Be the first to comment!