Movies about chess have traditionally been box office poison. Filmmakers have tried many different ideas and concepts to make them attractive to the general masses, but without success. That is up to now. Veteran screenwriter Scott Frank (Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report), in creating, co-writing and directing the Netflix mini-series The Queen’s Gambit, seems to have found the solution. He has adapted the book The Queen’s Gambit by Water Tevis, who also had three of his other novels made into movies: The Hustler (1961), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and The Color of Money (1986).
Tevis was a keen chess player and wrote The Queen’s Gambit in 1983, a year before his death. The same way that he made The Hustler interesting for people who knew nothing about the game of pool, he achieved the even more unlikely task of making chess fascinating. He has utilized a number of devices. Firstly, he made the protagonist a young girl. This makes the protagonist stand out more in a sport dominated by men. Better still, he made her an orphan. This provided the opportunity for scenes in an orphanage, depicting her as an outsider, becoming addicted to tranquilizers, learning chess from the old janitor there and becoming totally obsessed with it, with her only friend a brash and non-conformist African-American girl. Later in the series, Beth confides that she feels secure and in control within the 64 squares of the chess board. After being adopted, she remains a loner and outsider in school.
Other directors, including Michael Apted and Bernardo Bertolucci have tried unsuccessfully to bring Tevis’s book to the screen. Scott Frank’s masterstroke is to make full use of the film’s sixties setting. The era of sex, drugs and rock and roll amongst young people. With great help from production designer Uli Hanisch and costume designer Gabriele Binder, they have created with fine attention to detail the looks and fashion of the sixties. Sixties music is also an integral part of the series and in many instances songs are used as a narrative device. There’s also a nod to the civil rights movement.
During the sixties, Russians still ruled supreme in chess. The idea of the Russian chess grandmaster and world champion Vasily Borgov (Polish actor Marcin Dorocinski bringing gravitas and coolness to the role) being challenged by the young American female chess champion Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) has, in addition to the gender and age angles, been given further spice by the presence of cold war. Chess championships are usually held in drab looking halls and auditoriums. By setting the various championship events in Mexico City, Paris and Moscow, Frank has added more colour, contrast and opportunities for plot twists to the initial events held in various US cities. These include Beth’s adopted mother meeting a pen pal, who resembles a thirties screen hero, in Mexico City, Beth being introduced to the French way of carefree living and loving in Paris and seeing the genuine passion for chess in the streets of Moscow.
Frank and his cinematographer Steven Meizler have brought new and inventive visual concepts to a movie about chess, chief among them the idea of Beth imagining chess pieces coming to life on the ceiling of her bedroom. The addition of vivid colours in everything from Beth’s dresses to her surroundings as we progress from her life in the orphanage to becoming a celebrity travelling the world (she’s told at one stage, “you are more famous than The Monkees!”), is also very effective. Aficionados of Cinema Paradiso will also notice a scene in the final episode which owes a debt to that Italian classic. In fact, Frank has not shied away from pulling at the audience’s heartstrings in that episode.
Another strong feature of the series is its casting. The actors and actresses selected for every role seem perfect. Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Harry Melling and Jacob Fortune-Lloyd make their mark as Beth’s chess adversaries, later turned lovers and helpers. The pick of the supporting cast though is Marielle Heller, herself a director (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), who in the role of Beth’s adopted mother is compelling as a woman whose aspirations of becoming a concert pianist were dashed by her own inhibitions and her husband’s lack of support, thus making her an alcoholic who finds renewed hope in her drab life when she adopts Beth.
Even with all the above, it is unlikely that The Queen’s Gambit would have become the success that it undoubtedly is without the captivating central performance by Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon. She manages to convincingly portray all the shifts in Beth’s character as she goes from being a teenager cut off from the world around her, obsessed with chess and addicted to tranquilizers to becoming more mature, dealing with unrequited love, sex, alcoholism, money, loss of loved ones and fame. After her eye-catching turn as the eponymous central character in Emma (2020), this series is bound to make her a bona fide star.
© 2020. UniversalCinema Mag.