"Poets do not go mad" said GK Chesterton, "but chess-players do." Bobby Fischer, Jewish son of a card-carrying Communist, may have started out representing the entire Free World at chess during the Cold War, but he ended his days a paranoid, self-exiled anti-American – and vociferous anti-Semite.
This sad, startling, and often brilliantly compelling documentary doesn't, or cannot, explain how the troubled Grandmaster tumbled so completely through the looking-glass. However, audiences will draw their own conclusions about what happens when children are denied childhoods, then left to become lost forever in a game that prompts furious leaps of logic... and, perhaps, a certain paranoia.
Garbus previously co-directed 1998's superb 'The Farm: Angola, USA' about lifers at America's largest maximum security jail. And for Fischer, chess seems to have been both liberator and gaoler. "I used to play against myself" he once said. "I almost always won." Archive footage captures him aged 15 playing 46 matches simultaneously, "wiping away opponents like flies"; a changeling child for whom life will never touch normality again. In later years, he'll pose for a LIFE photographer, bobbing cross-legged in a swimming pool, defying gravity, before trooping back to a tiny hotel room, alone.
Fascinatingly, we learn there's a long history of chess-casualties. One fellow claimed to have played God, via his wireless set. (God lost). As a featured chess-pert suggests, start thinking outside the box, and you might well find yourself "unable to get back into it".
There's a dispiriting scene towards the end, in which a ranting Fischer is confronted at a news conference by sportswriter Jeremy Schaap, whose journalist father Dick once wrote that Fischer hadn't "a sane bone" in his body. "From what I can see", adds Jeremy, "I see nothing to disprove his case." Fischer is momentarily stumped, lost for words. Checkmate. As Chesterton observed, it's not creativity that screws you up, but logic.
This sad, startling, and often brilliantly compelling documentary doesn't, or cannot, explain how the troubled Grandmaster tumbled so completely through the looking-glass. However, audiences will draw their own conclusions about what happens when children are denied childhoods, then left to become lost forever in a game that prompts furious leaps of logic... and, perhaps, a certain paranoia.
Garbus previously co-directed 1998's superb 'The Farm: Angola, USA' about lifers at America's largest maximum security jail. And for Fischer, chess seems to have been both liberator and gaoler. "I used to play against myself" he once said. "I almost always won." Archive footage captures him aged 15 playing 46 matches simultaneously, "wiping away opponents like flies"; a changeling child for whom life will never touch normality again. In later years, he'll pose for a LIFE photographer, bobbing cross-legged in a swimming pool, defying gravity, before trooping back to a tiny hotel room, alone.
Fascinatingly, we learn there's a long history of chess-casualties. One fellow claimed to have played God, via his wireless set. (God lost). As a featured chess-pert suggests, start thinking outside the box, and you might well find yourself "unable to get back into it".
There's a dispiriting scene towards the end, in which a ranting Fischer is confronted at a news conference by sportswriter Jeremy Schaap, whose journalist father Dick once wrote that Fischer hadn't "a sane bone" in his body. "From what I can see", adds Jeremy, "I see nothing to disprove his case." Fischer is momentarily stumped, lost for words. Checkmate. As Chesterton observed, it's not creativity that screws you up, but logic.