Cold War drama Pawn Sacrifice plays out on chess board
After starring as the titular superhero in the first Spider-Man film franchise, Tobey Maguire went back to his roots as an independent movie player.
Sure, Maguire made a big studio detour in 2013 portraying Nick Carraway opposite Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby.
But even then, the actor and producer was deep into one of his special projects called Pawn Sacrifice, a movie profile of U.S. chess master Bobby Fischer.
For a decade, Maguire obsessively pushed to get the biopic made as a headlining vehicle for himself. And eventually his determination paid off.
“I needed to get it done and there was definitely a decent amount of information out there about Bobby Fischer,” he says
The movie’s centrepiece is the re-creation of the renowned 1972 Cold War World Chess Championship. The famous competition matched the Soviet Union’s revered Boris Spassky (played by Liev Schreiber) and Maguire’s Fischer, one of the few U.S. players capable of the challenge.
Shot in the championship’s location of Reykjavik, Iceland, in Montreal and later Los Angeles, the film is dedicated to capturing a moment in time when the chess fixture figuratively pitted communism against capitalism via Spassky and Fischer.
Helping maintain the period authenticity is veteran director Ed Zwick, who made his mark with such previous film efforts as Glory, The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond. Screenwriter Steve Knight is best known for his work on Eastern Promises.
Besides Schreiber, Peter Sarsgaard portrays Father Lombardy, who is Fischer’s aide and Michael Stuhlbarg is the mysterious fixer who offers free management services to Fischer.
Mostly, though, the movie profiles the unstable chess genius from his early days to his emotional and mental collapse into paranoia and fear.