Review of Pawn Sacrifice (2015) by Connor C — 24 Dec 2015

A tense story of inner demons and the paranoia that slowly began eating away at the world famous chess prodigy, the iconic Bobby Fischer. The film does a fine job of clashing the two elements of Fischer's life, his inner struggle with hyper sensitivity and a paranoia about communists and if everything is the way he needs it to be for safety, coupled with his legendary bout with Grand Master Boris Spassky in a match set up to be the chess equivalent of Rocky 4, except much more factual and stuck in reality.

The film does acknowledge what the famed match signified to the United States at the time it took place in 1972, during an era where America was leading a supposed losing battle against the Russians in Vietnam.

An American victory was exactly what most were hoping for to give them a sense that our enemies of the time were still beatable on one field or another. Toby Maguire plays Bobby Fischer as a self-centered, arrogant, unabashedly boastful, conceited and stubborn man-child to some degree while also showing the inner workings of Fischer's mind, such as his deterioration into anti-Semitism and bitter hatred of communism and his rapidly accelerating paranoia over every detail of his life, resulting a complex and frequently unlikable yet real performance as a boy who had to grow up too fast because he was given a skill no one else had, driving him down a path towards madness.