SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER, directed by Steven Zaillian
Child in Pawn
In my green and salad days, I played poker at a down-at-the- heels Manhattan club that also provided a motley haven for aficianados of other games. I was struck by the difference between my fellow punters and the stoned chess buffs who hung out there. Like the man said, poker isn't necessarily a sociable game, but it is a social one. A modicum of interpersonal expertise is required to keep the plungers plunging and the money flowing: here as elsewhere in my poker experience, an atmosphere of ironic gregariousness mostly prevailed around the green felt.
With a few notable exceptions, the chess addicts were a different, far more off-putting breed. While not quite as unsocialized as the Dungeons and Dragons cadre who seemed to come to the club directly from their coffins, the chessmen (I recall no female zealots; more would doubtless be found today) seemed a generally schizoid, often surly lot uncomfortable even in each other's company. They were especially merciless towards outsiders who assayed to enter the charmed circle, only to be demolished and ridiculed as mere "potzers" -- unworthy dabblers. Their means of support seemed slender. They held day jobs of small interest, or eked out marginal livings through matches or teaching chess. Money clearly wasn't of interest: one sensed something numinous in the purity of play informed their passion.
Searching For Bobby Fischer, Steven Zaillian's compelling film, illuminates such unlikely -- and not always likeable -- characters, their quirky elitism and furious competitiveness, the grinding frustrations and obscure satisfactions along the path towards their peculiar grail. The idiosyncratic world of master level chess is beheld freshly through the eyes of Josh Waitzkin, an appealing child prodigy. The screenplay is based on sportswriter Fred Waitzkin's account of Josh and his family's search to reconcile his fabulous gift with a normal life.
Josh presents as a bright, sweet-natured, but otherwise unremarkable seven year old, with a typical latency kid's exuberant messiness and love of sport -- until his genius mysteriously blooms. He learns the rudiments of chesss at school, covertly observes speed played for small stakes amongst Washington Square's seedy fraternity of chess hustlers. Vinnie, a fast-talking black street grandmaster, immediately recognizes a kindred spirit in statu nascendi. He takes Josh under his wing, revelling in the sheer pleasure of Josh's wakening to the game. Soon Josh is beating the pants off the regulars.
Bonnie Waitzkin discovers Josh's park adventures. She can't convince her husband about Josh's astonishing skill, for Josh doesn't want to hurt his beloved dad's feelings, and throws their first game (a nice touch: chess is replete with Oedipality, and no little boy truly wants to win the Oedipal struggle -- of which more presently). Fred then tells Josh to play it straight. His skepticism gives way to amazed admiration when Josh trounces him without a second thought.
Fred approaches Bruce Pandolfini, a reclusive grandmaster who no longer competes or teaches. At first he's dismissive; tries to scare Fred off with warnings about the grueling, thankless demands of a life in pawn to chess. But then he, too, falls under the sway of Josh's awesome potential and begins tutoring him. His instruction is immensely exacting and intensely cerebral. At one point, he sweeps the pieces from the board in aid of demonstrating the potency of pondering the infinite range of their combinations within abstract mental space.
For Pandolfini, chess constitutes a supreme, revered aesthetic, light years beyond mere gamesmanship. The Washington Square crowd he deems a sorry bunch of potzers, scammers. He fears that the smash and grab tactics Vinnie espouses will compromise Josh's dawning awareness of the game's intellectual depths. Vinnie for his part believes Pandolfini's vision is bloodless, even feckless -- "you're not learning how to win, but how not to lose". The first round of their implicit match goes to Pandolfini: Josh painfully consents to abandon the Park.
Despite Josh's zest for battle, Pandolfini is curiously ambivalent about sending him into tournament play. He ducks out of joining his protege when Josh finally embarks on the juvenile circuit with his father. Its paradoxical ambience is hilarious, and a bit scary: what appears on the surface as a first-day-of-school gathering of scrubbed cherubs and anxiously doting parents is actually an arena of terrifyingly absorbed wee gladiators, hounded by pushy and ill-tempered handlers (in one witty scene the judges pen up the grown-ups outside the hall, to the kid's wild applause). The ordinarily equable Fred feels little in common with these agitated stage-door types. But as Josh's career flourishes, he's swept into the whirlpool of fierce parental ambition. Meanwhile, Pandolfini is urging ruthless disdain towards one's adversaries as a crucial instrument of victory -- a teaching utterly contrary to Josh's essential gentleness.
The boy starts to come unglued by the pressures assailing him. He loses spectacularly, provoking his father's untypical fury. Bonny now realizes how Josh is being torn apart -- her family, as well, dismisses Pandolfini, and threatens to leave with the children. Fred recognizes he has slipped into enjoying Josh's successes as proxy triumphs, pitched at redeeming something poignantly incomplete within himself (it's no less true for being trite that many a sportswriter is a frustrated player). Josh returns to Vinnie's kinder care, and the Waitzkins unite around creating a viable existence for Josh beyond the chessboard.
Josh resumes playing impressively, signs up for a major national match. Pandolfini begs Fred not to let him compete, fearing Josh will lose to another prodigy, an icy little machine who owns no life other than chess, radiates the supreme contempt for one's adversaries Pandolfini recommended.
This boy's teacher, a sardonic colleague of Pandolfini from the old days, suggests that the latter had once "disappointed" his teacher. The implication (which the script could have better clarified) is that Pandolfini, lacking sufficient killing spirit himself, suffered the devastating loss he now fears Josh will endure, a terrible narcissistic injury which precipitated his own withdrawal from competition.
At the tournament the field is narrowed down to Josh and his nemesis as predicted. The Waitzkins and Vinnie are unexpectedly joined by Pandolfini, to attend the harrowing struggle unfolding on closed circuit TV between the tiny combatants. Josh's strategy manages to meld Vinnie's verve with Pandolfini's technical elegance. His behavior towards his baleful opponent embodies the decency of his upbringing and his innate generosity of spirit.
Josh's inner synthesis of helpful and conflicting influences, discarding what no longer makes sense, internalizing and remodeling what does, classically proceeds during adolescence. That this complex psychological process should unfold in an eight year old's psyche is perhaps another measure of Josh's precocity. At any rate, it reflects the formidable stresses precocious kids frequently confront, and do not always resolve so handily. (While the film's upbeat conclusion does make abundant psychological sense, it also seems too Hollywood-tidy on replay.)
Zaillian's direction, if breaking no new ground, is crisply workmanlike. He notably resists the nauseous cuting-up which has come to mar Spielberg's approach to child actors. It's also to the director's credit that one doesn't have to know chess strategy to appreciate the depiction of the game's emotional vicissitudes, and the exhilirating kinetics of the match sequences (which owe a debt to Scorsese's sparkling work in The Color of Money).
Joan Allen and Joe Mantegna are credible as Josh's parents.
Given a virtual absence of personal history, Lawrence Fishburne's Vinnie is miraculously there for us, a hiphopster Mercutio bristling with quicksilver wit and smouldering intelligence. Ben Kingsley is magisterial as the no less enigmatic, brilliant Pandolfini, conveying volumes of sensitivity -- and desolation -- beneath a preternaturally reserved demeanor. Max Pomeranc, reputedly a chess player himself, is enormously affecting as Josh. Another gifted child, Michael Nierenberg, impresses in the unrewarding role of Josh's haughty, finally pitiable opponent.
Throughout the film, Josh's voice-over meditates on his ideal, Bobby Fischer, accompanied by stills and newsreels of the reclusive American champion. "Another Bobby Fischer..." is a repeated incantation of spectators watching one or another child prodigy. For chess aficianados, Fischer's play seemed to capture the ineluctable epiphany residing at the game's heart; and his retirement at the height of his powers constituted an overwhelming tragedy, to be redeemed only by the discovery of another once and future king. (Masters have vanished from public view after famous victories before, e.g. Paul Morphy in the last century. Vis-a-vis the game's Oedipal resonances, did their triumph represent an unconscious, guilt-ridden vanquishing of the paternal imago? Were they, in Freud's words, "wrecked by success"?)
Josh is an obvious candidate for Fischer's throne. But one wonders if Pandolfini's prescription of intimidating disdain may have been correct after all. At or away from the board, Fischer's behavior has not been merely difficult, but downright repugnant. It's moot whether his by no means uncommon -- if extreme -- meanspirited pugnacity is a central, perhaps genetic factor in the makeup of those who attain the zenith of play. (Be it noted that my evidence on these points is completely anecdotal.)
WIth thus regard, one views the real Josh Waitzkin's future doubtfully. The film's terminal statement that Josh is now a teenage chess wizard who also fishes, plays baseball, so forth, augurs well for his progress as an integrated human being away from competition. But it remains a vexed question whether a terrific disposition ultimately makes or mars one's career in a milieu where nice guys, if they don't finish last, are not known for regularly reaching the summit.