Saturday, November 21, 2020

The Queen's Gambit review / From an orphanage basement to the top of the chess world

Anya Taylor-Joy
The Queen's Gambit

The Queen's Gambit review – from an orphanage basement to the top of the chess world

Anya Taylor-Joy plays a 64-square prodigy in Netflix’s gorgeous Walter Tevis adaptation, which – while heavy on rags-to-riches fantasy – proves great fun

Lucy Mangan

Friday 23 October 2020

s the tale of a woman who rises from discovering the game in an orphanage basement to the pinnacle of the chess world, Netflix’s new miniseries The Queen’s Gambit can’t really fail. When it’s based on the book of the same name by legendary short story writer and novelist Walter Tevis, upon whose work the films The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Color of Money were also based, the odds of success seem even higher.

As such, there is plenty to like and to admire in this new, seven-part drama (starring first Isla Johnston then Anya Taylor -Joy as the prodigy Beth Harmon). We watch her become addicted both to the pills handed out – legally, apparently, in the 1950s when her story begins – to the children every day to keep them calm and compliant and, gradually, to the chess board and the control and solace it offers. Mr Shaibel (Bill Camp) introduces her to the coach of the local high school’s chess team and from thereon she is away, powering through the ranks until she becomes a giant-slaying grandmaster. Adoption by a local couple does not turn out to be the hoped-for domestic idyll, but when the husband abandons his alcoholic wife, Alma (a heartbreaking performance by Marielle Heller, more usually found directing the likes of A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood and Can You Ever Forgive Me?), she and Beth form a fragile connection that is strengthened when Alma discovers that winning chess tournaments can be quite the money-spinner. Soon they are travelling the country and then the world together, with Alma turning Beth into her drinking buddy as they go. She’s a pill-popper, too, and refilling her prescriptions provides Beth with a nice little supply of tablets of her own.

It looks gorgeous, the main performances are superb, the vital chess exposition neatly done and the true meaning of each game to Beth is made clear, whether spiritual battle, learning curve, inner reckoning, occasional flirtation, retreat from or re-emergence into the world. However, without the anchoring point of a true story behind it all, it has the feeling of a fairytale rather than the sports movie or biopic its trajectory and tropes keep pointing viewers towards. Beth’s rise is virtually frictionless. Her first loss doesn’t come until halfway through the series, her addictions don’t hamper her until even later, and as a young woman in the male-dominated world of 60s chess she meets virtually no sexism, let alone predatory behaviour. The men she faces across the board and trounces sometimes look a bit cross, but are for the most part nobly admiring, and Beth’s greatest source of annoyance seems to be the magazine interviews that keep referring to her as “a female chess genius”.

Though it tries to rise to the height of commentary – on the thin line between genius and madness, how we may be hoist by our own self-sabotage petards, whether we can hope to overcome our inner and/or our chemical demons – The Queen’s Gambit functions best and for the most part as a wish-fulfilment, rags-to-riches fantasy. Will she win again, this 64-square hustler? Yes! Will she learn and grow from her (board-based) mistakes before a Soviet superplayer and show him the colour of her money next time? Yes! What would it be like to be that good at something that young? To be born – fall to earth, you might say – with the kind of mind that vaults you immediately, unstoppably into a tiny elite and brings you global glory? Unlike chess, The Queen’s Gambit is slightly less than the sum of its parts, but you will have a great deal of fun watching them at work.

THE GUARDIAN