Bobby Fischer Against the World – review

The cold war on a chessboard ... Bobby Fischer Against the World.

Liz Garbus's gripping documentary about the life and times of the troubled American chess genius Bobby Fischer asks a number of questions. Did Bobby's missing dad create an emotional void which was neurotically filled with chess? Is there something in the game that encourages immersive obsession and ultimate madness? Would Fischer have gone the same way if he had been a plumber or a welder? And why is it that antisemitism is the bigotry of choice for mentally ill people?

Bobby Fischer Against The WorldProduction year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 12ARuntime: 92 minsDirectors: Liz GarbusMore on this film

Non-chessers like me are already basically aware of the second and third acts of this American life. The middle act was Fischer's sensational world championship victory against Boris Spassky in 1972 followed by an immediate withdrawal into depression. His victory was perhaps merely an interruption to the reclusiveness which had, in effect, begun many years before. The last act was his bizarre resurfacing in the old federal Yugoslavia 20 years later – a wild, bearded and paranoid Jew-hater – for a preposterous "rematch" with Spassky, followed by another excursion into his stateless, misanthropic wilderness, culminating in his hateful gloating over the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers.

What Garbus does is fill us in on the missing first act: Fischer's heartbreakingly lonely, vulnerable boyhood in Brooklyn in the 1950s, the son of an absent dad and a Jewish intellectual mother who campaigned on liberal issues. The sight of young Fischer, a child prodigy in a crewcut, is extraordinary. Maybe only the pen of a Roth or a Bellow could do justice to it. Garbus does not mention Vladimir Nabokov's 1930 novella The Defence, about an unhappy grandmaster, later filmed as The Luzhin Defence. It is almost a premonition of Fischer's life.

When Fischer squared up to Spassky, the US had just whupped the Soviets in the space race. Yet plenty of influential Americans were nettled at the Russians' Sputnik-era swagger when it came to chess, a sport they ruled by intensively talent-spotting and coaching the brightest young sparks. An American talent like Fischer, on the other hand, was pretty much on his own. Nixon's chess-loving secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, encouraged Fischer to take on Spassky. Mercurial and highly-strung – mannerisms that appeared to be those of a temperamental artist – Fischer dithered. The controversial British businessman Jim Slater, of Slater Walker fame, donated $125,000 to the prize money and Fischer decided that the deal had been sufficiently sweetened. The scene was set for a titanic contest between ideologies. Garbus finds newsreel footage of an American chess fan declaring boldly that Fischer would win, because he gets to keep the prize money: "If Spassky wins it, most of the money will go to the Russian government."

The championship began, characterised by bizarre outbursts, mind games, and complaints from both men about cameras, alleged covert recording equipment and secret electrical currents. Garbus paints a convincing portrait of this encounter as the distilled quintessence of the cold war: icy, restrained, suspicious, a mental contest between aliens beamed live into the nation's homes from another planet. There appeared to be telepathic counter-espionage, an incessant calculation of possibilities … all leading to the psychological doomsday scenario.

Yet however delighted America was with the result, however much it wanted Bobby Fischer to be the all-American hero, he just wouldn't play along with the Hollywood script. He was no clean-cut Neil Armstrong. He was as gloomy and difficult and exotic as the Russians. And, unforgivably, he failed to defend his title three years later, leading to accusations that he was a quitter. Fischer vanished into hermit-dom, now neither a clear winner nor a loser, and Garbus suggests that his disappearance was a part of the long malaise of 1970s America.

Fischer was clearly a difficult, solitary kid with a fractured home-life, and yet plenty of kids have similar difficulties without growing up to be prodigies and geniuses. His poisonous antisemitism is deeply ironic, considering that he is Jewish – was this some kind of self-hate? It's impossible to say. What is extraordinary is that no one, apparently, seemed prepared to say that the poor guy clearly had undiagnosed mental problems and badly needed professional help. Somehow, his genius status rendered considerations like these entirely null and void.

One of Garbus's interviewees compares him to Ali before the Rumble in the Jungle. Surely, a better comparison is with Glenn Gould, the great Canadian piano genius. Gould would cancel concerts if his piano stool was the wrong height; Fischer was a no-show on account of real or imagined problem. Gould withdrew from the public gaze at the height of his fame and so did Fischer. But Gould, and other geniuses from the arts and sciences, left substantial legacies behind. Fischer leaves behind … what? The memories of great matches, a residue of passion and pain. Chess consumes so much human energy and produces no monument. With its fascinating interview footage and tremendous black-and-white still photographs by Harry Benson, who was permitted great access to Fischer, this is an intriguing portrait. Its pessimism makes it a difficult watch.

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