Cue the chess puns and metaphors all you want, but Pawn Sacrifice is more about what happens off the board than on it.
Sure, it’s a fairly straightforward chronicle of the classic 1972 world championship chess match between American prodigy Bobby Fischer and Russian nemesis Boris Spassky. But underneath the surface, this mix of biopic and historical docudrama concerns how the Cold War political climate at the time fueled a circus-like atmosphere surrounding the match, raising the game’s international profile and turning its competitors into intellectual prize fighters.
The film traces the rise of Fischer (Tobey Maguire) from his working-class Brooklyn upbringing to his rise to chess prominence and his subsequent paranoia about the government and the global chess establishment. His erratic tendencies add some flavor to his inevitable meetings with Spassky (Liev Schreiber), whose poker-faced confidence is just the opposite of his neurotic opponent.
Fischer’s obsession with being the best in the world drives both his mentor (Peter Sarsgaard) and his manager (Michael Stuhlbarg) crazy, and his antics at the world championships in Iceland upstage the actual brilliance of the match itself.
By the time it starts, the title clash has been framed as the ultimate showdown between good and evil, which spawned unprecedented media coverage and turned both players into celebrities. As one pundit exclaims: “We lost China. We’re losing Vietnam. We have to win this one.” Yet as the title’s double meaning implies, Fischer is the pawn who’s more concerned about the game than politics.
That’s where you sympathize with his situation. However, Fischer’s off-putting eccentricities — he’s stubborn, paranoid, arrogant, and temperamental, and occasionally just a screaming lunatic — make it difficult to embrace him as a hero.
Still, he’s a fascinating character portrayed with complexity by Maguire, as a social outcast who can’t think two or three moves ahead in his personal life. Does he secretly want the spotlight on him? Is he unpatriotic or a master manipulator?
As directed by Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond), the deliberately paced film gains momentum during its suspenseful staging of the climactic match (after all, chess is hardly a spectator sport). Yet Pawn Sacrifice only occasionally sparks to life and too often lacks depth and context in its effort to provide a clinical study of Fischer’s behavior and mannerisms. It unfortunately keeps itself in check.
