In miniseries ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ chess and addiction battle for a prodigy’s soul
You do not have to understand chess to be riveted by “The Queen’s Gambit.” Just give Netf lix’s new sevenepisode miniseries your time and undivided attention, and you will be a winner within two episodes. Or one, if you’re a quick learner.
Written and directed by Scott Frank (“Godless,” “Out of Sight”) from Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel of the same name, “The Queen’s Gambit” follows the dizzying rise of the fictional Beth Harmon, a driven, laser-focused prodigy who tears through the maledominated chess world of the 1960s. With her penetrating eyes and killer instincts, Beth leaves players and naysayers gaping in her wake. And if you have the patience to let the slow-moving but immediately stylish early episodes unfold at their own deliberately languid pace, Beth Harmon and “The Queen’s Gambit” will slay you, too.
Like any good premium-TV antihero, Beth (who is played by Isla Johnstonas a girl and Anya
Taylor-Joy from the teen years on) is a genius and a mess. When we first meet her, the already fatherless girl has lost her mother to a car accident. She ends up in a Kentucky orphanage, where the girls line up for the daily doses of Librium that are supposed to keep them calm and happy. For Beth, the pills turn out to be both magical and diabolical, expanding her little-girl mind even as they are marking her for life.
Under the tutelage of the older and more experienced Jolene (Moses Ingram, making a
tremendous impression in her TV debut), Beth learns to hoard her pills and take them at night, for maximum escapist impact. Shortly after she is introduced to the Librium, Beth spies the school’s custodian (Bill Camp, “The Night Of ”) playing chess in the basement and makes two seismic discoveries. The first is that she is very good at chess. The second is that the pills make her even better.
When she hits the stash hidden in her toothbrush cup, Beth can see chess games playing out on the ceiling over her bed. And from that point on, the drugs and the chess are so enmeshed, Beth is convinced that she can’t succeed at one without the help of the other. As Beth goes from being a 9-year-old chess novelty to a champion and magazine cover girl, much of the show’s tension comes from the question of which obsession will ruin her first — the chess, the pills, or the doubt?
Fortunately, there is more to Beth than her dysfunction. Even better, there is much more to “The Queen’s Gambit” than just another downward spiral.
Early in the series, the teenage Beth is adopted by Allston and Alma Wheatley (Patrick Kennedy and Marielle Heller), an unhappy couple whose troubled marriage eventually leaves Alma free to manage Beth’s skyrocketing career. Once Alma and Beth join forces, “The Queen’s Gambit” becomes about something more than genius and addiction.
As Alma and Beth hit the competitive chess circuit, their relationship becomes both warmer and weirder, and the series gets even more interesting. Watching the mesmerizing Taylor-Joy crush her male opponents with the cutthroat grace of a samurai never gets old, but hanging out with Beth and Alma as they share drinks and count the prize money is just as quietly thrilling.
You probably know Heller from her nuanced directing of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” but her tender and spiky performance as a
smart woman trapped by suburbia is a real wonder. And after having a gleeful good time playing a conniving high schooler in “Thoroughbreds,” TaylorJoy plays Beth with both a watchful intelligence and a combustible ferocity. Beth wants to win, and TaylorJoy won’t stop until her heroine is the last champion standing.
With burnished cinematography from Steven Meizler; plush period costumes (Gabriel Binder)and set design (Uli Hanisch); and a gorgeous, sweeping score by Carlos Rafael Rivera, “The Queen’s Gambit” ranks right up there with “The Crown” on the classy-TV scale. Thanks to Frank’s dreamy direction and elevated writing, the series keeps the potentially potboiling mix of chess-game drama, addiction trauma and gifted-genius fireworks at a hypnotic simmer.
Chess may be known as the Game of Kings, but in the richly rewarding “The Queen’s Gambit,” the spoils go to the commoners on the couch.
First Look: “The Undoing” (HBO)
Speaking of pot-boilers, HBO unveils “The Undoing” on Sunday, and oven mitts are recommended. Set in upper-crusty Manhattan, this six-episode miniseries opens with an ominously gray New York cityscape and a young boy discovering something terrible on his way to school. The action then f lashes back to two days earlier,
when Grace and Jonathan Fraser (Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant) are still a loving power couple (she’s a therapist, he’s an oncologist) and their biggest problem appears to be an annoying school fundraiser looming on the horizon.
But that is before Grace and her gaggle of privateschool moms meet the mysterious Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), the beautiful young mother of a scholarship student and an unsettling presence in their tidy lives. Then we discover what the boy saw on his way to school, and it becomes clear that the Frasers’ Manhattan bubble is about to pop in a big, messy way.
Created by David E. Kelley (“Big Little Lies”) and directed by Susanne Bier (“Bird Box”), “The Undoing ” starts at a high pitch, and given Kelley’s love of glossy pulp, it will likely stay that way. Kidman gives Grace a breathless intensity that telegraphs meltdowns to come, and Grant delivers his wittychap banter with just the hint of a shadow, leaving us with the not-surprising impression that Things Are Not What They Seem in the Fraser house.
On the other hand, things are probably exactly what they seem to be in “The Undoing.” It won’t be a subtle or surprising show, but it will be distracting enough to keep your TV bubble aloft. It’s an important job, and “The Undoing” is well-equipped to do it.