It’s sort of amazing that it’s taken so long for Hollywood to get around to dramatizing a fascinatingly bizarre event that riveted the world’s attention in 1972 between the Watergate break-in and the Munich Olympics massacre — the world chess championship match between Bobby Fischer and Russian Boris Spassky held in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Tobey Maguire does a great job as Fischer in “Pawn Sacrifice,’’ a biopic that covers the wacko chess genius’ life from a budding chess prodigy to the historic match with the much less eccentric Spassky (a terrific Liev Schreiber). The match was halted several times as Fischer demanded more money — and, at one point, a change of venue to a pingpong room.
Edward Zwick’s film blames Fischer’s paranoia, anti-Semitism and general craziness on his unconventional upbringing by a single mother (Robin Weigert) who was a Jewish communist and who refused to tell her son which of her many lovers was his father.
Though already famed for his unorthodox style, Brooklyn-raised Fischer drops out of competitive play until a patriotic, chess-loving lawyer (Michael Stuhlbarg) offers to serve as his manager for free so they can challenge Russian dominance of the game.
It’s not easy, with Fischer storming out of matches and tearing apart his hotel rooms, convinced the Soviets have planted listening devices.
With a grandmaster priest (Peter Sarsgaard) serving as his second and unofficial coach, Fischer pursues the world championship, which the Soviets fiercely prize because of its enormous symbolic significance during the Cold War.
The only chess match considered so important it rated coverage on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports’’ was front-page news for days in that pre-Internet era, as the world waited to see what Fischer would do next.
The film does not cover the latter years of Fischer’s controversy-packed life, which included a rematch with Spassky, renouncing his US citizenship — and finally living in exile in a grateful Iceland, the only country that would give him asylum, until his death in 2008.
But back in 1972, Bobby Fischer briefly became America’s greatest hero for defeating Spassky — and the sixth game of their match, which is the sensational high point of the worthy “Pawn Sacrifice,’’ is still considered the greatest chess game ever played.