CHECKMATE: YOUR INTEREST ISN’T CAPTURED
Boring chess scenes in Pawn Sacrifice detract from the story’s human drama
PAWN SACRIFICE
½ Starring: Tobey Maguire, Liev Schreiber Directed by: Edward Zwick Running time: 114 minutes Serious chess players will be familiar with the dreaded zugzwang. The term describes a state of affairs in which any move at all will weaken the player’s position. In zugzwang, the player is doomed by his very need to make a move.
Bobby Fischer found himself in zugzwang with Boris Spassky before they even sat down at the board.
Their 1972 World Championship match in Reykjavik represented a crisis of action for the young U. S. grandmaster: Lose to Spassky here, Fischer understood, and his inferiority to the top world player would prove incontestable. But defeat Spassky, his most distinguished rival, the man he’d shaped his career toward trouncing — well, what then? Fischer had defined himself so much by his pursuit of ultimate victory that he didn’t know what would happen if he attained it. Either move would weaken him. Better not to play.
That’s the human conflict behind the chess championship. And as human conflicts go, it’s a rather compelling one: obsessive, totalizing, fraught with intrigue. It’s hardly surprising that it should be the drama seized upon by Pawn Sacrifice, a new film about Bobby Fischer ( Tobey Maguire) and his muchpublicized match against the Soviet player Boris Spassky ( Liev Schreiber) in Iceland.
Because it’s true that human conflicts are easier to dramatize on screen than, say, a game of chess — as Pawn Sacrifice quickly makes clear.
It is, of course, difficult to make chess interesting visually. Part of the problem is that high- level play is incomprehensible to laymen. You can get a pretty good idea that what Roger Federer or Usain Bolt are doing is extraordinary even if you don’t follow their sports. Their prowess is self- evident.
But the genius of a FischerSpassky match doesn’t lend itself well to casual observation. There are no slam dunks or hat- tricks to hoot about. Chess prowess is internal: “a stunning clarity of thought, a merciless logic,” as Nabokov said.
Pawn Sacrifice has devised several ways to get around the problem. The first is the classic cutaway: Every ambiguously provocative decision on the chessboard is clarified by a cut to someone reacting to it exaggeratedly, so we know straight away whether that exchange of knights or rook play was the right one. These reactions range in source from grandmasters in the wings to prostitutes and hotel clerks scoping out the game on TV. During the Cold War, even chess got popular attention.
More effective is the film’s habit of simply forgoing any chess matches it can stand to excise. If a musical montage or cut from a game’s beginning to end can illustrate without fuss the result of Fischer’s efforts, why do otherwise?
I suppose that prompts another question: If you’re better off skipping over the chess, why make a chess movie in the first place? It’s another zugzwang. Show the chess and risk boring an audience, or omit the chess and miss the point.