TV review: ‘ The Queen’s Gambit’
Coming- of- age story ‘ The QUeen’s Gambit’ is thoughtful, exciting and entertaining
WalterTevis’s 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit, about a female chess prodigy, has becomea miniseries, premiering Friday on Netflix. It is a sports story, a coming- of- age story and a becoming human story, and also a kind of mortal version of that popular modern genre, the inner life of a superhero, and the first thing to say about it is that it is very good — thoughtful, exciting, entertaining. Tevis was also the author of the pool novel The Hustler, its sequel, The Color of Money, and the sci- fi parable The Man Who Fell to Earth. The Queen’s Gambit sits among them as a mathematical sports novel with an uncanny heroine.
It is also, in screen terms, something like a cross between The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel— a lovingly decorated period piece, stretching fromthe late 1950s through most of the 60s, concerning a young woman triumphing in whatwas then considered a man’s game— and A Beautiful Mind, as an attempt to concretely represent the workings of an unusual intelligence livingway out in the abstract.
The second thing to say about it is that it’s quite faithful to its source material. There has been some alteration of minor characters and expansion of major ones, for the usual reasons of exposition, but nothing out of the spirit of the story. Only a few of Tevis’ scenes are missing, and nearly all of his dialogue is spoken in the miniseries, whichwas developed by Scott Frank ( Get Shorty, The Wolverine) and Allan Scott ( Don’t Look Now) and written and directed by Frank. And much that is not spoken aloud in the novel’s text is turned into speech aswell.
Third, and perhaps most important, it’s about chess as chess; there is something almost audacious in making a series in which the main dramatic action involves two people at a table, moving little carved pieces of wood around, punching a clock and taking notes. Nobody is murdered, except metaphorically, in tournament play or physically assaulted or even sexually harassed, which is a little surprising, given the premise, and refreshing among lurid shenanigans that make up so much contemporary television.
Beth Harmon ( played as a preteen by Isla Johnston and as a teenager by Anya Taylor- Joy) becomes a star so quickly and unequivocally that all bowdown before her; her greatness is never in question, any more than is Superman’s ability to leap tall buildings at a single bound and she is told almost fromthe time she learns the game from the janitor at the
There is something almost audacious in making a series in which the main dramatic action involves two people at a table, moving little carved pieces of wood around.
orphanage where she lives ( Bill Camp) that she is “astounding” and “maybe the best ever.”
By the second episode, Beth will be adopted and, notwithstanding some mutual incomprehension, find an ally in her new mother ( Marielle Heller as Alma Wheatley), a mutually supportive, mutually exploitive relationship in which Frank has made sure we see the warmth— little physical connections that register hugely.
Throughout Beth will battle, or give in to, alcohol and drugs— a recurring theme in Tevis’ fiction and life— beginning with the tranquillisers she’s fed at the orphanage, a kind of junior One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest situation. While key to the story, it is somewhat less convincing onscreen than the chess, because addiction is harder to play than concentration, or easier to overplay, and perhaps because it is something we have seen often in the talking pictures.
As to the chess, it is, of course, a compressed version of the game; there is a passage in the book where Beth takes an hour to make amove, sitting with eyes closed, and there is noway to represent it on- screen that won’t have viewers leaving the roomto cook dinner or whatever.
Yet even when the play moves fast, there’s a stillness to it, and a quiet, and Frank mostly holds back on the underscoring, at least until the finale, when he lets everything rip. And even when Frank hauls out some old Hollywood effects or surgically inserts a line of cornball dialogue, itworks.—