I’m not sure whether the bizarre tale of Bobby Fischer tells us more about the nature of chess, the nature of the United States of America or the twisted dynamics of the Cold War. But it is indisputable that the greatest chess player our country has ever produced – and quite likely one of the two or three best in the history of the game – was the paranoid schizophrenic son of a Jewish Communist, who wound up embracing a far-right, anti-Semitic brand of evangelical Christianity. Whether chess made Bobby Fischer crazy or whether certain kinds of mental illness are especially attuned to the complexities of the game and the intense focus it demands is not an answerable question. Both things may well be true. But this much we know: The Cold War made Fischer crazy, along with the rest of us. And if we think the disorder vanished after 1991, we’re kidding ourselves.
Fischer’s 1972 showdown with Soviet world champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik was one of the strangest and most symbolic confrontations of the entire Cold War era, matched in jingoistic fervor only by the “Miracle on Ice” hockey game in Lake Placid eight years later. It turned a game that involved stone-faced men staring at a board for hours in silence, pursuing threads of reasoning and strategy that even those who understand the rules can barely follow, into front-page news and a centerpiece of TV broadcasting. Edward Zwick’s new film “Pawn Sacrifice” sticks admirably close to the facts of that peculiar historical moment, and features a showboat performance from Tobey Maguire as the increasingly disturbed Fischer, along with a more composed one from Liev Schreiber as the taciturn Spassky.