Early in the documentary “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” there is black-and-white footage of an interviewer asking a young Fischer what he does when he’s not playing chess. “I don’t do too much,” he says. That one line suggests why Fischer was perhaps the greatest chess player ever to live — and why he later displayed his insanity for the world to see in scenes almost as gripping as his games.
“Bobby Fischer Against the World” gives ample evidence of both sides of Fischer’s strange nature and suggests that they fed off one another. In this reading of the man, the same obsessive compulsion that made him a teenage champion in the late 1950s eventually turned him into an anti-Semitic (despite his own Jewish heritage) whose disturbing politics lost him his U.S. citizenship. It’s a complicated story — Malcolm Gladwell talking about how genius is developed through “10,000 hours of deliberate practice first,” rehashing his own book, sounds so ridiculous.
| On screen |
| ‘Bobby Fischer Against the World’ |
| 3 out of 4 stars |
| Stars: Bobby Fischer |
| Director: Liz Garbus |
| Rated: Not rated |
| Running time: 93 minutes |
It was particularly sad when Fischer, long past his prime, became a man without a country, until Iceland offered him a home. “I thought it would be good for America, for democracy, to have an American winner,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recounts, with some irony. In fact, in his match against Boris Spassky in 1972, in which Fischer took the World Championship from the Soviet player, one critic says he “represented the entire free world,” adding that it was “too much on these shoulders.” (The documentary also notes that his mother was a communist activist whose FBI files are extensive.)
He played Spassky again in an unofficial rematch in 1992. It took place in Yugoslavia, then under a United Nations embargo. His own country was also interesting in talking to Fischer about his unwillingness to pay taxes on his winnings; he never returned.
After seeing a young Brooklyn kid take on the world — and win — we must then witness him unable to play against his own demons. It’s a gripping story, in the way we can’t stop looking at a train wreck. But it’s not what we should remember about him. As one man in this documentary says, “Just his games, that’s his monument. His games.”
