Change Your Image
ChessLeveller
Reviews
The Queen's Gambit (2020)
Queen's Gambit Declined
This is a much vaunted American Netflix mini-series of 7 episodes, directed by Scott Frank based on the novel of the same name by Walter Tevis and starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon, a teenage chess prodigy.
I had heard a lot of very good things about this series and tuned in with high expectations, but was rather disappointed. For one thing the chess content is woefully inauthentic, notwithstanding that the show boasts no less an eminence than former world champion Garry Kasparov plus American master Bruce Pandolfini (of "Searching for Bobby Fischer" fame) as advisors. But what they were advising the producers on is a mystery for there is little kinship with the real world of competitive chess.
Trying to summarise the sprawling and ungainly plot as briefly as possible, the drama opens with what seems to be a terrible car accident in which Beth's mother is killed but the nine year old Beth is unharmed, and seemingly having no other relatives is put into an orphanage; a rather spartan institution where the children are all apparently doped up to the eyeballs with tranquilisers to keep them quiescent. There she makes the acquaintance of the janitor who she sees playing chess and learns the game from him, discovering a prodigious natural talent for the game and improving very rapidly to the point where she beats him regularly.
In due course she is farmed out to adoptive parents, an odd couple where the emotionally distant father evidently does not want the child, but the neurotic and near-alcoholic mother does, perhaps as a substitute for a deceased natural child (this is never made clear). Taking up chess again she enters the Kentucky State championships and wins the tournament easily, overcoming much male prejudice along the way of course, and wins sizeable prize money. The father vanishes, ostensibly on business, but it is soon evident that he has abandoned the family to take up with another woman. The step-mother, now in straitened financial circumstances, sees Beth as a potential meal ticket and encourages Beth's burgeoning chess career. They tour around the circuit together staying in hotels as Beth progresses dramatically, winning tournaments and making friends with various leading players including master Benny Watts, a maverick figure, who looks vaguely like he has emerged from a spaghetti western. She is bent upon defeating the Soviet world champion, Vasily Borgov, to whom she loses in a couple of tournament games; rare reverses for her.
Along the way she overcomes alcoholism and drug addiction, the death of her stepmother and a variety of other travails, before travelling to Moscow to play in a tournament where matters culminate with her encounter with Borgov, whom she defeats after drawing upon hitherto concealed inner resources. Your typical, and highly contrived, cinematic climax, set amidst a welter of slushily sentimental montages.
It is difficult to know where to start with a critique of this offering. Beth Harmon's career progression is unconvincing in the extreme. She apparently learns the game from the janitor at her orphanage in Kentucky, picking up the rudiments of the game with astonishing rapidity. So far, just about believable. But, after a lengthy layoff forced on her by the Principal as punishment for drug stealing, she is shown picking up the game again and enjoying an almost untrammelled path to the top, suffering almost no setbacks or career doldrums with which even the most gifted players would be afflicted. For example, she wins the Kentucky state championships with ease at her first attempt, sweeping all before her, and of course humiliating chauvinistic male players along the way. This is just too much.
Then there is the matter of her date with destiny viz. The reigning world champion, the Soviet Borgov. Despite her fervid desire to take him on and defeat him she does not seem to partake in any sort of World Championship cycle, which is scarcely even mentioned, but merely goes from one tournament to another, culminating in Moscow 1968, where she faces Borgov. We see little or no contact with anything in the form of chess officialdom, such as the USCF. There is no distinction drawn between games and matches; a very common error; nor between matches and tournaments and her game with Borgov is presented as if this single, solitary tournament game is a World Championship decider. As with many of these tournaments, it is presented as if it were a knockout format with all other players eliminated.
The chess is not convincingly portrayed. Dramatic music overlays the play, and the players move very fast even well into the middle game and respond almost instantly to every move of their opponent even in the most difficult of positions, and often do not write the move down as would be required (though admittedly one occasionally forgets). The production fails utterly to convey the rhythms and register of top level competitive chess where players alternate between intense study of the board and casual wandering about in between. Players do not sit rooted to their seats for four hours or more. They do not talk to each other very much, if at all, during play, and certainly are not supposed to, and do not tend to confer genteel and orotund tributes to their winning opponents, nor do audiences applaud. The names of great players, openings and chessic terminology are sprayed around in the dialogue and may sound impressive to a lay viewership, but for the initiated none of it sounds plausible nor really makes sense. She even conducts detailed technical explanations of her games with her stepmother who hangs on every word, yet as a non-player she would surely have found it incomprehensible. It is as if the scriptwriters have been supplied with a chess lexicon and selected words and names almost at random from it.
Leaving the chess aspects aside and regarding the show purely as drama it falls down badly in many respects. There is a mishmash of styles and it lacks any truly unifying theme. There are very frequent flashbacks to her childhood, which gradually enables one to fill in the blanks of the storyline and her personal history, though some matters remain obscure to the end.
Characters float in and out of the story at various points to strut their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more, or re-appear fleetingly, by which time they have often undergone personality changes. The devil-may-care Watts is an egotistical narcissist and then a deeply sympathetic individual, dedicated to advancing Beth's career. Another early chess opponent, Harry Belkin, similarly arrogant, becomes a stressed-out caring soul concerned about Beth's descent into alcoholism. The stepmother starts out prim and proper but degenerates swiftly and seamlessly into alcoholism and sexual licentiousness. Beth herself is depicted as a child as introverted and almost autistic but transmogrifies into a sexually promiscuous, hard-drinking, drug-taking teenage rebel. Admittedly, people may undergo character reformation over time or have submerged traits that rise to the surface as they mature but these conversions often seem implausible and motivated by the requirements of the plot.
The performances are generally good but not outstanding from a (to me) fairly unfamiliar cast and Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth acquits herself well. She is played by at least three actresses at different ages. Her physical development, if not her mental and spiritual, is convincingly done.
If this series is trying to say something about life, adversity, talent, obsession, addiction, female emancipation or whatever, then I am unsure what it is.
Happy Valley (2014)
Brilliant and Compelling Television
I had caught bits of episodes from this series in the past and thought it seemed promising, but had never really watched it properly or fully. But now I have; the first two seasons and the first episode of the third season, courtesy of the BBC I-player and I am so very glad I have because it is stunning and riveting from first to last.
Everything about it is brilliant. The writing, from Sally Wainwright of Scott and Bailey fame is outstanding with deeply drawn and very believable characters, cracking and authentic dialogue that could almost have been improvised, and gripping and complex storylines with interweaving plot threads that have you both marvelling at the ingenuity and gasping at the audacity.
The acting is superb all round from literally everyone in the cast. Sarah Lancashire delivers a magnificent performance in the lead role with a finely judged blend of toughness, sexiness, street-wise intelligence and emotional vulnerability. She is wonderfully supported by a host of outstanding actors, especially Siobhan Finneran, George Costigan, Steve Pemberton and James Norton who is utterly and totally believable as a violent and murderous psychopath. Rarely has there been such a convincing portrayal of evil.
The direction is top notch, including from Wainwright herself who I had really only thought of as a writer. It makes excellent use of the West Yorkshire landscape with its old mill towns still bearing the hallmarks of their Victorian and pre-Victorian origins in the industrial revolution, with buildings that seem almost to sprout naturally from the earth. We have sweeping aerial camera shots that take your breath away and which then home in on specific streets and houses and make you feel you have been deposited right there. The background music is so good because so unobtrusive and wholly in keeping with the tenor of the show.
Overall it gives us a captivating and revealing slice of modern northern working-class life with its drug culture so pervasive and the associated evils of squalor, poverty, illiteracy, benefit dependency and petty crime.
I cannot fault it except perhaps that the central premise of the first series stretches credulity almost to breaking point, with our being required to accept that its meek bookkeeper protagonist has sufficient motive to initiate the crime perpetrated.
This is the best British police/procedural I have seen, and arguably the best thriller/drama series ever. It is comparable both in style and quality to such great American series as The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad.
Fantastic!
The Iron Lady (2011)
The Iron Lady shows signs of metal fatigue
I finally got to see this much hyped film recently. It is undeniably an interesting and even an intriguing film, though very far from being a great or even an outstanding one. I say this because whilst it undoubtedly leaves a deep impression on the mind and features a very remarkable performance from Meryl Streep as the eponymous ferrous female, the film has too many deep and significant flaws. As is well known the film depicts the now aged and infirm Lady Thatcher as the framing device within which we see her development as a person and as a politician. Streep's performance has not been over praised. It is the most extraordinary portrayal of a real and living person that I have ever seen, almost eerily so. As the aged Thatcher it is at times hard to believe that we are not watching the real person, so brilliant is her impersonation, with its mixture of stridency and dithering, and as the younger, prime-of-life Thatcher, she is equally impressive, conveying the brisk, bustling authority and unflinching certainty. This no mere impression a la Rory Bremner, Jon Culshaw, or Ronnie Ancona, but rather the production of a believable individual by inhabiting that person's universe. The once iron lady is now suffering a severe case of metal fatigue, and her hold on rationality is uncertain, hard-headed commonsense flickering on and off like a torch with a dodgy battery, as she fights off the attentions of her now dead husband. The propriety of this approach to the portrayal of a still-living person has of course been questioned, but it is a compelling, though hackneyed narrative device. But whilst the performances are outstanding the problem with the film really lies with its politics, and the extreme difficulty of trying to encapsulate a long and tempestuous premiership within the confines of a ninety minute film. Clearly the film-makers (director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan who wrote The Hour) had decided not to focus on any single aspect of the Thatcher premiership such as the miners strike, the Falklands War, or the Brighton hotel bombing, as one might have imagined that they would do, and instead we get a panorama of her years in power, ranging from industrial strife, to the Falklands, to Cabinet arguments over economic policy, to Europe, the Brighton bombings and the IRA, the Cold War, etc, etc. You name it and it is there, briefly covered and mainly in the form of contemporary archival news footage, with perhaps the odd little scene involving Thatcher and a collection of ministers, or a House of Commons scene. This is okay as a sketch of her time in office, but it fails to get to grips with the core of her political beliefs and the reasons why her premiership was so intensely controversial. Did her government transform the country and was this for better or worse? These are the questions that need to be addressed, but aren't really, and cannot really be in a ninety minute film. Where were the arguments over economic policy, tax and spending, privatisation, monetarism, inflation, etc? Admittedly these are hard concepts to deal with in a ninety minute film, and one starts to wish for a lengthier treatment which only television can give. Indeed such treatment has been given in such BBC offerings as "Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley" (2008), directed by Niall MacCormick, written by Tony Saint and starring Andrea Riseborough, dealing mainly with her rise, and "Margaret" (2009), directed by James Kent, written by Richard Cottan and starring Lindsay Duncan, about her fall. Admittedly the former looks and sounds a bit like "Carry On Up The Conservative Party", but never mind. Or indeed the "Falklands Play" (2002), directed by Michael Samuels and written by Ian Curteis, where she is portrayed very effectively, though without any attempt at physical impersonation, by Patricia Hodge, dealing with a singe decisive issue of her career in great depth and providing a very effective drama about what was arguably the turning point of her premiership. There are other liberties too. Mrs Thatcher was certainly not present at the murder by car bomb of her mentor Airey Neave, and to show her rushing to him after his death is a dramatic liberty much too far and more in keeping with the conventions of a Hollywood blockbuster than a serious British film dealing with real-life events. It would have been just as effective, and in keeping with the truth, to have shown her horrified reaction on camera when she was informed of his death during the course of the 1979 election campaign. Even Mrs Thatcher did not wear a hat in the chamber of the Commons, where headgear is strictly prohibited. Another error, and one that I feel may be inadvertent, unlike the aforementioned, is her "makeover session" with Gordon Reece and Neave, which did not take place until she was well into her spell as Leader of the Opposition, and not before her election to the leadership as the film suggests. And what of the odd bit of dialogue in this scene where, as she prepares for her leadership bid against Heath, she is saying to Reece and Neave that she did not imagine that she would ever be prime minister! Why then was she standing for the leadership? Did she envisage leading the Tories to electoral defeat if she gained the leadership? This makes no sense politically or dramatically, and is at odds with the whole tenor of the film, which correctly portrays her as utterly convinced of her right, duty and capacity to lead the country.
A beguiling but unsatisfactory film.
Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011)
Bobby Fischer Against Himself
This is the much-hyped documentary about the life and career of Bobby Fischer, told by means of contemporary interviews with friends, colleagues, journalists, organisers, etc, interleaved with archival footage and photos, to create an intriguing portrait of the most controversial and, in the view of many, the greatest chess player in the history of the game. I had heard a great deal about this film and wasn't quite sure what to expect but I was certainly not disappointed. The centrepiece of the film is inevitably the famous 1972 world championship match between Fischer and Spassky, around which Garbus weaves the story of his life up to that point and the course of his life afterwards. Of course we all know the story forwards and backwards, and it has been told many times in the numerous books about Fischer and the match, but nonetheless it is still fascinating to watch again the footage of that momentous match and (for those of us old enough to remember the sixties and the seventies) to re-live those times: the world of Nixon, Kissinger and Brezhnev; of Watergate, Vietnam and race riots; above all of the Cold War, for which the match inevitably became a symbol.
There is much footage that I have never seen before, such as Bobby's appearance on "I've Got A Secret", the US equivalent of "What's My Line" in 1958, as a callow fifteen year old in jeans and t-shirt, and on talk shows over the years up to his appearance on the Dick Cavett show in 1972, in addition to material often shown. Fischer emerges inevitably as a brash, arrogant, yet complex and tortured soul. We can chart his development as a player and a person from that crew-cut teenager to the smartly suited young man of the 1960s, up to the Reykjavik match, and from that to his sharp deterioration thereafter, both physically and mentally, until his re-emergence in the early 1990s, now as a bulky, lumbering, heavily bearded middle-aged man. The film is, inevitably, a bit light on hard chess content, but nonetheless there is a moderately good account of some of the early games of the 1972 match, such as the "bishop blunder" of game 1 and the masterpiece of game 6, but one cannot expect too much in this regard because the film is surely pitched at a non–specialist audience.
There are fascinating vignettes from people such as Larry Evans, his long time friend and collaborator, and Anthony Saidy who was close to Bobby at the time of the match, and with whom Bobby was staying in New York. (Saidy looks and sounds like he should be in the Sopranos - if he made me a draw offer I wouldn't refuse!) Kasparov inevitably makes an appearance as an interviewee, and is predictably scathing about the 1992 re-match, just as Fischer was contemptuous of the Kasparov-Karpov matches of the 1980s which he insisted – without ever providing any evidence – were fixed. There is intriguing material about his mother, Regina, a remarkable woman, suspected of Communist sympathies and on whom the FBI had a bulky file, and whom he subsequently rejected.
There is much material on the post-1972 Fischer, who effectively retired from chess by making impossible demands on organisers and arbiters and became a recluse, and who then, after his sanctions-busting re-match against Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992, became an enforced exile, in various countries. Searching for Bobby Fischer became a furious pastime for sections of the media. Then there came his virulently anti-Semitic and anti-US comments, particularly after 9/11; and finally his arrest in Tokyo at the behest of the US, the offer of citizenship from Iceland, his move there, and finally his death in 2008 at the age of 64.
The special features include an item on the battle over Fischer's estate between his Japanese wife (which seems to have been a marriage of convenience), his Filipino girlfriend and her daughter (whom she claims implausibly to be his) and his nephews, which is still being contested in the Icelandic courts. I have one slight gripe. The photograph of Fischer on the front cover of the DVD (and which is used in all the promotional material) has been accidentally reversed (fortunately he is not sitting at a proper chessboard so there are no board reversal issues).
There is a great deal of riveting archival material here, and some penetrating insights from a large cast of chess players, friends and commentators. It raises many questions, not all of which it can answer. Did Fischer desert chess after 1972 for fear of losing? Was he clinically psychotic towards the end of his life? What was the effect of his mother on his early development as a boy and did his monomaniacal concentration on the game warp his character? But, all in all a fascinating study of tormented genius, grippingly told.
Incidentally I have heard that there are plans to make at least two other films about Fischer. Are these documentaries or feature films? If the latter then I have always thought that James Woods would be ideal for the role of Fischer, due both to his facial and physical resemblance and his line in brash, arrogant characters.
The Hour (2011)
The Hour is 360 minutes too long
The Hour is a bold attempt on the part of the BBC to weave together a suspense thriller, a political drama and a social satire to produce a work that provides a commentary on the state of British society in the mid-1950s, as reflected and refracted through the camera lens and its treatment of current affairs, and which tries to explain the way in which society and television was fighting to break out of its straight-jacket. Unfortunately it does not really succeed and though one can see what the producers were trying to achieve it falls lamentably short.
The politics of it does not convince, and nor does its depiction of television in this era, which was still hidebound by the conventions and technical limitations of the time, in particular the fourteen day rule which precluded the coverage of political questions which were going to be debated in Parliament within a fortnight. This was mentioned by the characters but then seemingly disregarded. Of course, the point was that they were smashing through the barriers, but it nonetheless fails to convince. It was indeed the Suez crisis that brought about the effective demise of the 14 day rule, but as a result of the pioneering efforts of Granada and ITV (only brought into being one year previously) not the BBC.
More generally the whole ambience of The Hour (both the show itself and the show within the show) is that of a later era, the mid-sixties perhaps rather than the mid-fifties. When I first saw the trailers for the show I guessed from the look of thing,the graphics, the central characters, etc that it was circa 1963 and that the show within the show was something akin to That Was The Week That Was. Television current affairs was simply not that spontaneous,rebellious or innovative in 1956, and the show fails to convey the sheer stodginess of life at that time in Britain.
There are quite a few seeming anachronisms, particularly in speech and manners, though admittedly one can never being completely sure of that, and some things jar horribly. It is inconceivable that a presenter would be brought on impromptu to do an interview in shirt sleeves. Both Romola Garai and Ben Whishaw look wrong for the period, and seem vaguely as if they have been time-warped back from sometime in the 1960s. Again this may be deliberate on the part of the programme-makers, to demonstrate that they are trail-blazing, avante garde figures, but I doubt it.
Moreover,much of the plot was obscure and failed to make any sense, and some scenes were plain ludicrous such as the fight scene in episode 3 between Whishaw (Lyon) and the MI6 chappie within the hallowed precincts of the Beeb itself. (Incidentally MI6 deal with espionage overseas not counter-espionage within the UK which is the remit of MI5). Characters are imbued with astonishing powers of prescience and political erudition way beyond what they would have possessed in real life (a common failing in historical dramas). Lyon has already managed to identify John F Kennedy as a major figure, and the characters greet Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal as a seminal event long before its real significance was apparent (I fancy that Suez was very much a slow burner as a political issue). This is probably designed to demonstrate the character's insight but it merely reveals the way in which the drama has been written with the benefit of hindsight and the script's failure to capture the real essence of the way people thought and felt during the period in question.
The oft-made comparisons with Mad Men merely serve to underline the superiority of that series in almost every respect. All in all the hour is a bit of a waste of time - 360 minutes of it to be precise.
The King's Speech (2010)
Good film badly marred by historical inaccuracies
As I expected from the trailers and from the various comments and reviews I have read the film is rather a travesty of history, and utterly misrepresents the characters and events of the time. No surprise there then, since it is rare for a commercial feature film to portray historical events with any degree of verisimilitude.
I think that Colin Firth is badly miscast as George, and though he struggles hard with the role he fails to convince chiefly because he is physically so wrong - too tall, too good-looking and altogether too commanding a physical presence. Also Helena Bonham-Carter is perhaps rather too pretty and shapely for Elizabeth. Others, too, are physically wrong for the roles they play, such as Baldwin and Churchill. Guy Pearce on the other hand is very convincing as the raffish and devil-may-care Edward (David) and in fact the believability of his portrayal tends to throw into sharper relief the "wrongness" of Firth as George, as for example, in the scene when Edward mocks and belittles him. The whole scene utterly fails to convince. Some of the other parts, however, are well played and a delight, especially Geoffrey Rush who is brilliant as Dr Logue (though I confess I have no idea what he was actually like), and it is interesting to see Ramona Marquez, so amazing in "Outnumbered" as Princess Margaret Rose.
But much more important than the miscastings, is the general tone of the film and its misrepresentations of the political and social realities of the time. Crucially of course is its depiction of attitudes towards Nazi Germany and the looming threat of war. The film credits many characters, but especially George V (a bit of a dimwit by all accounts) with extraordinary political insight and prescience. He at one point foretells and rails against Britain being squeezed, politically, between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The Royal Family are being recruited into the ranks of anti-appeasers, against all the evidence that they were generally rather non-political, and deeply conservative insofar as they were political at all. Certainly one cannot accept the idea of either George V or George VI as arch anti-appeasers. (At least this film was better, in this respect, than an ITV production I recall from a few years ago which has George, quite ludicrously and unhistorically, attacking Chamberlain's appeasement policy in conversation with Roosevelt on his American tour). The portrayal of Churchill as a supporter of George, when he was a die-hard supporter of the lost cause of Edward, is egregiously wrong. Many other things jar horribly, such as Baldwin "telling" George that Chamberlain is to succeed him as PM, rather than merely "advising" him as was of course the constitutional position. Most egregious of all the historical falsities is of course the final scene, which depicts an event which I am fairly sure never happened, namely the broadcast from Buckingham Palace to the nation on the outbreak of war. Of course it is understandable that the film-makers should need a climactic scene, for dramatic reasons, in which the "hero" overcomes the enemy, or in this case, overcomes his own weakness and inadequacy, and moreover does so in the context of using this personal triumph to rally the nation in a time of peril, for otherwise the film would just tend to trail away. But even if we are to accept this dramatic licence, I can scarcely believe that the broadcast would have happened in the way depicted, with George going out onto the balcony in front of a huge crowd of cheering people. This was horribly, crashingly, glaringly wrong. The nation was surely in a deeply sombre, despondent and apprehensive mood at this precise juncture, and no such scenes would have occurred. This was much more in keeping with the huge outpourings of celebration that occurred at the conclusion of the war, not at its commencement.
Robin Hood (2010)
Atrocious and predictable - predictably atrocious
This version of Robin Hood is one of the worst examples of the current trend in epic film-making. It is absurdly overblown, massively un-historical and fails utterly to offer any new perspective on the Robin Hood legend or the England of the late twelfth century, which it totally misrepresents in both its social and political aspects. I feared the worst and my expectations were not disappointed. The story makes little sense and bears no relationship to the actual events of the period - there was no French invasion and the foreshadowing of Magna Carta is preposterously anachronistic in its portrayal of the political arguments. King John is ridiculously caricatured and doesn't convince for one second as the real John. The attempts at humour fall flat, Russell Crowe's accent is indeed all over the place, but mainly in Ireland as has been said, and people's accents generally seem diverse to say the least. Cinematically it is a complete mish-mash of styles, but there is far to much CGI and the whole thing has an inappropriately metallic look to it, like a contemporary thriller set in the USA not an historical epic set in the English countryside of the 1190s.
SPOILER ALERT
The climactic scene of the French invasion looks like 'Braveheart' meets 'Saving Private Ryan' - taking the brilliantly conceived and executed scenes from those movies and bastardising them to fit into this vastly inferior one. How can as fine a director as Ridley Scotrt perpetrate this abomination!