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Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Pawn Sacrifice (2014)

No doubt about it, Bobby Fisher was an odd duck.  This movie does nothing to diminish that picture, but it does a lot to contextualize what happened with him.
Toby McGuire plays the adult Fisher, but even as a child he was both dismissive and tyrannical.  As portrayed, he is definitely on the spectrum.  He has a matter-of-factness to his superciliousness that is exactly dead on for Asperger's syndrome, but he has the addition of being a little bit mean and a lot paranoid.  Those traits blossom as he moves into adulthood, but in a way, they were entirely necessary for him to have any shot at all of competing with the Russian players.  He had to insist on things in order to more or less level the playing field and be able to have a shot at fame.  The film comes to a stop after the tournament he played with Boris Spassky in Iceland.  His experience on the world stage gave him household name recognition, but not an exactly adoring public, for reasons that are not sugar coated in this movie.  Well done.

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