Almost Nothing to Do with the Game of Chess

Rating: 5/10 (24 December 2016)

In 1993 Bobby Fischer was arrested for playing handball with his own poop. When the police interrupted he was ahead 7-3. He would have won!
Idiot-savant Bobby Fischer was really good at a board game. Americans—rightly so—mostly believed that chess was nothing more than a game, like bridge or Monopoly® and chose to pay more attention to other silly games like baseball and football. Bobby Fischer came along and for a brief moment in American history a lot of people feigned interest in chess. Fischer won some tournaments and then quickly went off the deep end and you have the feeling that he was a lunatic who probably walked around with a steaming load of crap in his pants as he played chess games in his head against an imaginary opponent.
Instead of the film's long music video sequences which attempt to capture Fischer's Asperger's Syndrome or whatever the hell was wrong with him it would have been infinitely more interesting to see a little more than a stereotypical view of his Russian opponent.
Speaking of the music, it was totally dreadful for most of the film and I found it confusing and distracting. I realize that they were trying to add a historical perspective with the music but it came across to me as amateurish and irritating and not even slightly relevant to the matter at hand which is chess. Fischer's personal mental state was absolutely the least interesting aspect of this story yet that's the main focus of the film. The historical significance of the events and how chess became—at least briefly—an important phenomenon in America and how Fischer became a household name seems to me to be a more important and a much more interesting subject for a film.
The least interesting thing about this guy was his mental illness. Chess, on the other hand, can be intriguing to most people with even a rudimentary knowledge of the game but it takes a skilled storyteller to pull this off. I would direct you to Martin Cruz Smith's novel Stalin's Ghost. The author's description of a speed chess tournament (called a blitz) is absolutely the finest writing about the game that I have ever come across. Movies try to make chess exciting by having players hurl pieces around the board and slam the clock after moves but this short episode in a book that has little to do with the game is positively thrilling. It is truly a masterpiece of writing.
And maybe they could have talked a lot more about the game of chess which was barely broached in the film.
P.S. I know that I said this before but the music in this was just about the worse use of music I've ever seen in a film.