Above:
Tobey Maguire as Bobby Fischer. Photo ©Bleecker
Street
How do you solve a problem
like Tobey Maguire? Somebody ought to
figure it out. The sincere, frog-eyed
star of “Wonder Boys,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Good German,” and the
“Spider-Man” trilogy is one gloriously eccentric thespian—yet his cache of film
roles remains sparse. I suspect most
filmmakers aren’t sure how to handle his unnerving ability to oscillate between
the tender and the creepy, a problem that “Pawn Sacrifice,” a new biopic in
which Mr. Maguire plays the much-vaunted chess champion Bobby Fischer, won’t
help.
“Pawn Sacrifice” begins, as so many post-“Citizen Kane”
films do, at the end, with Fischer on the cusp of a potentially career-making
match (note to filmmakers: just because Orson Welles savored scrambled
chronologies doesn’t mean you have to). It’s
not going well: while his opponent waits for him to show up, Bobby throws a
paranoid fit in his hotel room, tearing up his phone to search for surveillance
bugs, just before the film abruptly cuts to a scene from his childhood in
Brooklyn.
Bobby, we learn, has been mentally ill since his
youth. When he’s a young boy, we watch
him preen over his chess skills, rage against even the quietest noises, and
even order his mother (Robin Weigert) from the house. The fact that Bobby sounds less like a son
and more like an abusive husband is the first clue that something is seriously
wrong with this kid—a fact that his rapid ascent into fame (and Mr. Maguire’s
slender shoes) doesn’t dispel.
Ultimately, “Pawn Sacrifice” sheds its intellectual
trappings and becomes a standard sports movie, albeit one where the players
just sit, sweat, and glare at each other from across a table. That’s one of the movie’s most visible
failings—by declining to delve into the actual intricacies of chess playing, it
unknowingly asserts that great chess requires nothing more than a well-pressed
business suit and a travel case of dirty looks.
The actors exchange those well enough, though “Pawn Sacrifice”
often yearns for a string of authenticity.
I love Mr. Maguire; he’s been a hero to me ever since I saw him staring
out over Manhattan wearing his spider-suit.
But he’s miscast here, a larger-than-life presence in a role that
demands a more low-key brand of madness (on the other hand, Liev Schreiber
delivers just the right dose of droll amusement as Bobby’s rival, Boris
Spassky).
There is a great movie to be made from Bobby Fischer’s
life (especially since it was spun so thoroughly into the paranoid web of the
Cold War). Yet “Pawn Sacrifice” is too
crass, sloppy, and boring to even be called good. Even the film’s finest shot, an image of
Bobby slumped on a Santa Monica beach after a draining loss, flat lines. If the real Bobby Fischer sat on that beach
on that day, he likely felt genuine pain.
But in the movie, he might as well be posing for a picture, waiting to be
ushered on for the next scene.
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