Imaginary Characters Grafted onto Real Names

Rating: 1/10 (4 October 2015)

The first thing you need to know about this film is that is not a "true story". It is not the story of Bobby Fischer, nor of other major characters. It states in the beginning that it is "Based on a true story". What that means is that they have taken skeletal details about Bobby Fischer's life and about his increasing paranoia and mental instability, and about his historic world championship match with Boris Spassky, and crafted imaginary but plausible characters and plot points which might have fit the known narrative. While the film is serviceable B movie fare, I have to give it my lowest rating because of the fundamental lack of honesty. If you want to make a film about an imaginary chess player and set it within a context of 20th century Realpolitik, fine, have at it. But let your film stand or fall on its own merits. Don't claim it to be the story of a real person, a historic person of immense importance, to give your invented story a gravitas it does not otherwise deserve. Start with the casting itself. As many have pointed out, Tobey Maguire is vastly different from Bobby Fischer. But so is Liev "Ray Donovan" Schreiber vastly different from Spassky. Everyone in the performing arts thinks about the difference between "indicating" and "expressing". The casting of this film is a blatant case of indicating the "underdog vs the world" cliché by casting frail little narrow shouldered Tobey as the underdog, and casting 21st century anachronism cut-and-ripped, 6-pack gym bunny Liev Schreiber as overdog Spassky. They even throw in a shirtless, fresh-from-the shower, rippling muscled Spassky to beat the point to death. The reality is that Fischer was 6'2 or 6'3, and that he himself was the first top grandmaster to devote himself to physical fitness and strength conditioning. He was in fact the physically intimidating one, as opposed to the sedentary schlump, Spassky. And Fischer knew it. He was also a bit of a bully. Hardly the false narrative being presented in this film, and one with much more subtlety and ambiguity. The film gives Fischer a highly altered childhood to fit its concocted narrative. It introduces young Fischer's chess wizardry with a scene where Fischer's mother, Regina, takes him to one of the top players in New York City. Regina states that she wants Bobby to lose, to discourage him to the point that he will give up the game. The reality is that Regina was worried that Bobby spent too much time alone studying chess, but she supported his passion to the point that she attempted to run want ads to find other children as playing partners, and she took him to talented adults to coach and develop his game. A film mother who wanted him to quit, vs the real mother who wanted him to excel? As I said, this is not a true story. The film does show us a "seminal" scene where young Bobby, studying chess in his room, is haunted by sounds of Regina and some anonymous lover in her room. He confronts her, demands to know where his unknown father is, drops an F bomb on her, and tells her he needs her to leave because he needs silence. Later scenes report that she has in fact departed, going to California and leaving him alone in the apartment as he demanded. There is no evidence that this confrontation happened. None. She did in fact leave him, but in cold-hearted self-interest, to pursue her medical studies. The later wave of scenes where she watches from afar are pure Hollywood clichéd fiction. The film shows no strong male presence in young Bobby's life. There was in reality one important man. Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian born physicist, was as close to a father figure as Bobby ever had. Nemenyi came to visit young Bobby, took him on outings, and even paid for his schooling. He was an important figure in Bobby's life until he died when Bobby was 9. One can only imagine what this loss meant to Bobby. There's one other reason why Nemenyi belongs in the real story. He was Bobby Fischer's father. Regina never told Bobby, because of the stigma of a child born to a father who was not her husband. Bobby wanted to know where his father was, and Paul was right there, unknown. You want a gripping, emotional film about the real life of Bobby? That film is still waiting to be made. You want to see a passable, fictional account of an imaginary chess legend with lots of scenery chewing? See Pawn Sacrifice.