Oprah Movie Club: Searching for Bobby Fischer

1993 chess movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A sportswriter and his wife discover that their son might be a chess prodigy. Dad does what any good parent would do--spend loads of money to hire a curmudgeonly and socially-awkward coach, bitch at his kid when he doesn't seem to be taking the game seriously, and destroy everything that made the kid fall in love with the game in the first place. Then, they go fishing.

Warning: I will be mentioning the desire to punch prepubescent children in this blog entry. Overly-sensitive readers may want to go read my review of The Little Mermaid or something.

It's tricky business watching a movie based on a true story, especially one that happened fairly recently. See, I know of Bruce Pandolfini, and although I only know of him and don't actually know him, I know enough to know that he's not really anything like Ben Kingsley's Pandolfini in Searching for Bobby Fischer. But Kingsley's performance is strong, very Ben Kingsley-esque, and the character wears ascots and makes the movie and its story more interesting. And then there's the climactic match against the cocky kid who eats nothing but chess and sleeps with chess pieces scotch-taped all over his body, a training method known as Sleeping with Chess Pieces Taped to Your Body that was initially explored but quickly abandoned by Anatoly Karpov in the 70's. In the movie, the two young chess prodigies slam their pieces around as young Waitzkin's time dwindles, just a frenetic finish to a game that involved lost queens and skewers and forks with our little protagonist trick-or-treating his way to an easy endgame victory after his offer of a draw was declined. The reality? Well, they did actually draw, and Waitzkin won the tournament on tie-breaker points. But see, that's not nearly as exciting, is it? So what do you do with all that? Do you enjoy the movie as a movie, one where you really do get emotionally attached to its characters and root for the protagonist even though you're not sure you want the father to get anything he wants? Or do you watch with a more cynical eye, wondering if you should no longer excuse Hollywood's tendency to taint its tales and stop trusting humanity in general. Or is there a compromise?

This feels like a CliffsNotes version of the story anyway, at least for me--a guy who played chess obsessively and had lots of tournament experience in high school but now who still has a fondness for the game but barely even plays casually. Sidenote: I only have one chess opponent who either beats me in online games or forgets to play and loses on time, and that guy is actually in this movie. R.D. Reid plays one of the tournament directors in this, and he's the only friend I have who will actually play me. I suppose it could be a different guy named R.D. Reid since the R.D. Reid looks nothing like the one I know, but Hollywood has fantastic make-up people. So who knows? If you're reading this, Rubber Duck, how old were you when this came out?

But I digress. CliffsNotes version. I would have liked the father/son thing to build a little more gracefully than it does here. I almost never want movies to be longer than they are and even sort of get mad at movies when they are longer than 100 minutes, but this one could have been a little longer. Dad's jerkiness is not really even suggested, and then it comes so unexpectedly during a discussion with Josh's teacher--Laura Linney in her third movie and second where she plays a teacher--and then again after Josh loses to a patzer in the first round of a tournament in only seven moves and is yelled at in the pouring rain. It was a little hard to buy that the dad had a dickwad switch in his brain that was so easy to turn on, and it made it even more difficult to forgive the guy by the end of the movie even after it's revealed that he took his kid fishing. Here are some other things that I had trouble buying in this movie:

1) A scene during Josh's first tournament where a couple parents start brawling which results in all of them being locked in a cage. The brawling I almost believe. The forcing into a cage with a little kid running back and forth to let the parents know who is winning the big championship game? Not so much. Oh, and when the kids started clapping after their parents were removed? That's just silliness.

2) A very silly bit of dialogue where Josh first expresses doubt. The dialogue's no good there, and it's one of the few scenes where Max Pomeranc, the kid who's playing Josh, doesn't act very well. It was a scene that should have meant something but just felt undercooked.

3) The scene where Josh's opponent comes out very soon after the first round has started and looks all sad and is quickly comforted by his mother before it's revealed that he actually won? Come on, Hollywood. None of us are that stupid.

4) The oversized chairs the kids are forced to play in. You're having a chess tournament for elementary-aged children, and you're not going to find furniture designed for them? Sure, it visually shows these young players as a little more fragile than their parents think they are which works well with the theme, but it doesn't look all that realistic. In fact, it looks comical.

5) A moment during the final chess game where Pandolfini and Waitzkin seem to communicate telepathically which I'm sure is against tournament rules but probably hard to catch. That's silly, but at least it's not both silly and icky like when Josh whispers (telepathically) an "I'm sorry, Dad," a line that everybody involved in the film--even the children who don't really know much about anything--should have objected to. Icky.

So there's movie myth-making, and it's sometimes clumsy. But you know what? The good stuff outweighs all that. First, there's the cast which is really good from top to bottom. I like the auxiliary characters in this which help add an authentic color to the smoky chess club rooms or the scenes in Washington Park. I really liked the character played by Austin Pendleton--Asa Hoffman, a real chess player who apparently refused to be in the movie after he saw the script and how he was being portrayed. I've played with more than a few twitchy, borderline-neurotic chess dudes and just recognized that character as a composite of old guys I used to play with at the Terre Haute Adult Chess Club in a roach-infested basement back when I was a kid. I also liked the rantings of Steve Randazzo as the "Man of Many Signals," one of the parents responsible for the parents being locked in a cage. I wonder if Randazzo was supposed to have an even smaller, less-noticeable role but impressed the director with his ranting abilities. William H. Macy's shows off his glaring abilities, Tony Shalhoub is offered M&M's in one of the three scenes that made me want to see a scene where an adult punches Josh Waitzkin, and shane-movies favorite Dan Hedaya plays another tournament director. Oh, and the recognizable David Paymer is good as a sort-of foil for Joe Mantegna's father. Mantegna isn't bad either. Kingsley's great in that ascot, but my favorite character was probably Laurence Fishburne's as the street-smart chess hustler Vinnie who mentors the kid. Man, how great would it be to see Fishburne playing this character and playing a five-minute game with Samuel L. Jackson's character from Fresh?

The kids were all really good, too, and that's good because bad child actors would have completely ruined this movie. This was Michael Nirenberg's only movie. He played the big rival who glares even better than Macy does in this movie. The Poe character is a complete prick, and I wanted an adult to punch him even more than I wanted an adult to punch that smug expression right off of Waitzkin's face. "Trick or treat?" What the hell kind of trash talk was that? With very few spoken words, the little punk manages to make you want to see somebody beat him, either in a chess game or with a sock full of pawns, so you've got to say Nirenberg's effective. Of course, this is Hollywood myth-making, and Josh's real opponent was apparently nothing like Poe. He was younger, for one. I guess they really needed a villain in the movie, but I think I would have been happy with "parents" as the villain.

I was shocked to learn that Nirenberg died when he was only twelve, by the way. But then I noticed that the lone message board post on imdb, a person claiming to be his mother, said he wasn't dead. Reading through that thread, it seems that the erroneous information was corrected and then he died again and then somebody claiming to be his brother said he was alive and well and working as a chef and then he died again. Somebody needs to make a movie about somebody trying to kill Michael Nirenberg, at least virtually. Ben Kingsley would be perfect as the instigator of the hoax.

I was impressed, for the most part, with Max Pomeranc as Josh. He didn't have much of a career, but he's good here. It's obvious that he knows the game, something I think is so important for a movie featuring so much chess, and he's got these expressive eyes. The movie doesn't really demand much emotion from the kid, but the emotions are completely understood anyway, more subtly, and that works really well. I'm not sure how much Pomeranc was coached or if he was doing something very natural to him, but I really liked the slight differences in his facial expressions and posture when he was playing games in the park and playing games with Kingsley or in the tournaments. That was a great touch.

Another great touch, and my favorite thing about the movie--there's a guy on a unicycle wearing a suit made out of cans. I'd like a movie made about that guy, too. Ben Kingsley can play the villain in that movie, a preacher who keeps trying to tell people that the unicycle can guy is the Antichrist.

No, here's another great touch which is a little more serious. During the scene where Josh and his dad play a second game, one where Josh actually tries but keeps leaving to do other things, there's some nifty visual symbolism. On Josh's side of the board, where Josh currently isn't even sitting as he calls out his moves from the bathtub, is a stuffed Godzilla toy. In front of his father? A toy cash register. Ka-ching! That was pretty neat foreshadowing or symbolism or whatever you want to call it.

I'm not sure whether the chess in this was valid or not because there wasn't a lot that was shown. The moves were all legal anyway. I did see Poe move with one hand and hit his clock with the opposite hand which is a big tournament no-no. And the big climactic moment with the quick series of moves? It all makes sense, but Poe's smugness after he gets his queen does not make sense because even the most casual of chess players would have been able to see what was coming there. Surely, a kid who practiced the Sleeping with Chess Pieces Taped to Your Body training method would have seen that coming and just resigned. We also didn't get enough of that final game to know if Fishburne's "He's setting him up!" was right or not. The game just looked really sloppy to me, and that's a real problem for what was supposed to be a clash between a couple young titans. But who cares, right? Nobody actually cares about chess that much. Well, other than me. I do love watching this much chess in movies. Like with Fresh, I loved watching the chess in the park (something I'd love to do if I could afford to lose a bunch of money) with the trash talk and other banter and the sound of the pieces hitting the board and the slamming of the clock buttons. I loved watching chess in the rain, too. I didn't need all that terrible big movie music to accompany it though.

Oh, and just like with Fresh, there's a scene here where "check" is made into a much bigger deal than it actually is. The smugness on Josh's face during that scene where his mother's paid five bucks to play a smelly old man who allegedly beat Tal in the fifties was the first time I wanted to see an adult punch the kid.

Bobby Fischer didn't like this movie or the way his name was used which makes me want to give it a bonus point. I liked how his story was intertwined with Waitzkin's story, and I think I like little kid narrators. Fischer represents what little Josh could become, I guess, even though Fischer's definitely the extreme. A lot of footage used for this was also used in that Bobby Fischer Against the World documentary, another movie with Fischer's name that Fischer probably wouldn't have liked. I also like what this movie says about parents living vicariously through their children or sometimes pushing them to limits they shouldn't be pushed toward and the exploration of what it takes and what it takes from you to be really really good at something like chess. Kingsley's advice that you have to have contempt, that you have to hate your opponent, and how that clashed with the actual personality of the Waitzkin character and everything his mother loved about him was also telling. When this movie first came out, I didn't like the title much. I thought the movie bludgeoned the viewer with Bobby Fischer. I've changed my mind about the title, however. The adults in the movie, especially the chess fiends, are looking for the second coming of the titular chess wizard because it would be awesome if somebody as interesting and as brilliant as Fischer would come along again. But knowing what we know about Fischer, you really doubt that searching for another one is a good thing at all. This movie's story almost feels like a narrow escape for Josh Waitzkin.