"The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call laws of nature" - Thomas Huxley
"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialised. Chess is much purer than art in its social position" - Marcel Duchamp
"Chess doesn't drive people mad, it keeps mad people sane" - Bill Hartston
Classic, and stylish, cars, outfits, hotels, houses, lawns, and general Americana as well as, in many cases, an outrageously good looking cast made The Queen's Gambit (Netflix) a pleasure to watch at all times but The Queen's Gambit had as much substance as it did style. Perhaps even more. I found myself genuinely emotionally invested in the tale of Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Kentucky chess prodigy, and moved, often to tears, by the powerful and touching story that Scott Frank and Allan Frank had created for her.
Based on a 1983 novel by San Francisco's Walter Tevis (who also wrote The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Hustler, and The Color Of Money) it tells the tale of how young Beth (played in flashback by both Isla Johnston and Annabeth Kelly) is orphaned at an early age following a horrific, and barely remembered, accident, her life in the orphanage and the friendship she develops with Jolene (Moses Ingram), her introduction to the world of both chess and prescription drugs, her adoption into a middle class family, and her seemingly unstoppable rise in the world of chess.
While, at the same time, battling her twin demons of dependency and abandonment. She looks amazing and the show does too. The action jumps from Kentucky to Ohio to New York and then, more internationally, from Mexico to France to Russia as Beth's career goes further and further. Set in the sixties, her outfits, and the decor, almost act as a timeline to that decade and the soundtrack, too, moves through well known sixties acts like The Kinks, Martha and the Vandellas, Shocking Blue, Georgie Fame, and Herman's Hermits (whose The End of the World turns out to be something of a lost classic) while still pulling in a few outliers like Peggy Lee's Fever and Quincy Jones' Comin' Home Baby.
Even newer, and unknown to me, acts like Anna Hauss and Storefront Church bring their a-game to the soundtrack too. Not that swinging sixties music and posh frocks feature heavily in young Beth's life in the orphanage. She shares a dorm with twenty other girls, eats unappealing meals, gets fed tranquilizers, and witnesses other girls having their mouths washed out with soap and water for swearing.
Her friendship with Jolene and a burgeoning interest in chess (even though it's not, apparently, for girls) are the two positives that come from this time. Surly janitor Mr Shaibel (Bill Camp), grudgingly at first, teaches Beth how to play and she lies awake at night where the infinite possibilities of the game become an obsession for her. Perhaps one that is needed to distract her from the awful hand that life has dealt her.
Soon she's easily beating Mr Shaibel, taking on two players at once - and beating them both, taking on more than two players at once - and beating them, and even playing advanced chess games against herself in our own mind. It's not an obsession that abates when she is adopted by Alma and Allston Wheatley (Marielle Heller and Patrick Kennedy).
In their tastefully (for the era) decorated large suburban house, Beth is excited to have a bedroom with maple furniture and a four poster bed all to herself but not all is well with the marriage of the Wheatleys. When they're not arguing, Allston silently reads the paper and Alma plays piano (quite beautifully, her rendition of Satie's Gnossienne No 1 sent a chill up my back) and drinks. Which is, often, not quite so beautiful.
As an intelligent outsider, Beth struggles to make friends at school. She's ostracised, she's bullied, and she dines alone and, rather than joining dumb sorority groups, she finds comradeship, after a fashion, in the world of competitive chess. A male dominated world that is at first unsure about a young girl having a place in it is won over by Beth's ability and soon many of the male players become her friends and training partners as sure as they also become her opponents and rivals. Some even vie for her heart. Often without success.
Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) is the reigning US champion when we meet him. He's a charismatic dude with piercing brown eyes and a cowboy hat who carries a knife as surely as he carries a rock star attitude and a high opinion of himself. Even though he has such a babyface he could audition for Bugsy Malone. Or Crocodile Dundee Jr.
Despite this bravado ,Benny sees, in Beth, exceptional talent. As does the more modest Harry Beltik (Harry Melling, best known as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films), another rival who can neither compete with Beth's talent nor her passion. Townes (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) is handsome and supportive and when he touches Beth's face you can see, from her, genuine adoration but it seems they are to remain star crossed rather than actual lovers.
The ticking chess clocks seem to presage an imminent explosion in Beth's life, and the flashback scenes with her mother (Chloe Pirrie) prefigure this too, but as Beth travels from Cincinnati to Houston to Las Vegas to Mexico City to Paris and, ultimately, to Moscow and keeps beating ever more experienced players and winning more money and more tournaments, this is deferred.
One scene saw several chess enthusiasts bragging about their skills in a Las Vegas hotel lobby and I couldn't help thinking that the makers had put that in just so somebody could make a pun about "chess nuts boasting in an open foyer". Which is an open goal I wasn't going to miss. But, that aside, the drama is serious and moving.
Taylor-Joy brilliantly captures both the intensity of Beth's soul and the addictive nature of her personality, the two driving forces in her life, but she also gives us a glimpse into Beth's more playful nature when she dances to pop music on the radio and, better still, reminds us that there is still a lost little girl iinside this woman's psyche.
When Beth first visits New York City and sees the city's skyline, the look of wonder on her face is priceless. When Beth proudly declines a drink, before having second thoughts, she wonderfully illustrates the perpetual dichotomy of living with an addictive personality and her expression when music stirs up old memories should be familiar to anyone who has ever lived, loved, lost, and felt regret.
The way Taylor-Joy acts out the highs, the lows, the ups, the downs, and the joy and shame of yet another life threatening bender and the difficulty in trying to arrest that spiral of behaviour coupled with the fear that comes with it is just brilliant. Captivating from start to finish. It has to be really, because Taylor-Joy is rarely off the screen throughout The Queen's Gambits near seven hour run time.
Perhaps one minor criticism is that this doesn't allow other characters a chance to develop. It's not a big problem though. This is the story of Beth Harmon and though the aforementioned opponents, friends, and family members are all superbly portrayed they are, necessarily, peripheral to this unique and monomaniacal woman.
Credit too should go to Marcin Dorocisnki as Vasily Borgov, the expressionless and impassive Russian world champion, Louis Ashbourne Serkis as teenage Soviet chess prodigy Georgi Girev, Marcus Loges (whose brief performance as the ageing grand master Luchenko is lovely) and Millie Brady as Cleo. A French model friend of Benny's who lives, she claims, variously in Paris, Berlin, and New York and proves to be a bad influence on Beth.
Not that Beth cannot provide her own undoing. Her passion for self-medication and self-destruction battles for dominance with her passion for chess and The Queen's Gambit asks age old questions about the price we pay for creativity, the cost of genius. After a brief time in the sun, many will succumb to these addictions and demons and end up spending huge periods of time alone and unhappy.
Haunted and confused by their feelings, overcome by them even. In this maelstrom of emotional pain, poor life decisions are made - often in good faith, important connections are severed, and suffering goes unchecked. This, to me, rang true. My personal experience of relationships, friendships, family, and humanity in general has taught me that very rarely are people venal or manipulative in thought.
Nobody in The Queen's Gambit, to my mind, seemed to act in bad faith. But, as in life, people still got hurt along the way. There were tears of sadness but there were also tears of joy. Life, like chess, was presented as an abstract strategy game in which we're never 100% sure what the person we're facing is really thinking or how they are likely to react.
Often we don't know, for sure, what we're thinking or how we will react ourselves to situations. If you've ever suffered a long dark night of the soul, and surely most of us will have done, you will probably know that one of the deepest fears is that you will never escape that feeling. It's almost impossible to see in front of you, to see clearly. But, more often than not, you do escape that feeling, you do come to see clearly. You simply need a strategy to do so. As with chess, peace comes piece by piece. Beth Harmon's battle was not so much against her chess opponents as it was with herself. You'll watch enthralled to find out it her life ends in peace, or in pieces.
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