Photo courtesy of Netflix
The Queen's Gambit
Chess is a game of awareness as well as strategy. A master player must be aware of his or her opponent’s history and of the many possibilities inherent in each move on the chessboard. And then the player has to choose.
The Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” explores the choices in life and chess made by its fictional protagonist, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy in post-childhood scenes). The story follows Beth from the end of the late 1950s through the late ‘60s, a period when girls seldom went for chess and received little encouragement to pursue choices outside the home. A new wave of feminism was occurring, and although “The Queen’s Gambit” makes no reference to Gloria Steinem and company, it depicts a motivated young woman rowing against the steady current of social expectations.
Beth is well cast. Taylor-Joy’s large, intense eyes project laser-like skepticism of the world around her and body language is not at ease. She is continually forced to make sense of banal realities ordinarily taken for granted. Whether in the orphanage, her unhappy foster home, in high school or at chess matches, she’s always the alien in the room.
Episode one concerns her childhood in an orphanage where she discovers two abiding fascinations—the tranquilizers the institution feeds the kids to keep them docile and the board game she learns in the basement from the mournful old janitor, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp). The pills carry her to a cool, cushioned mental space where chess matches move like magic lantern shows across her ceiling. And those chessmen, each inscribed with a particular range of motion, are more meaningful to her than many of the people she encounters.
Although her foster father soon deserts the family, her boozy but benign new mom, Alma (Marielle Heller), learns to appreciate Beth’s potential. Alma once dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, but her ambitions had been stifled and Beth’s talent and drive gives her an opportunity for vicarious achievement through her adopted daughter. Alma becomes a chess stage mom, pushing Beth’s pursuit of competitive games and championships. Beth is a prodigy and looming over her future after graduating high school is the inevitable encounter with her Soviet counterparts. On the cultural front of the midcentury Cold War, America fought with jazz and Broadway musicals. The Soviets came armed with ballet and chess—and their grandmasters were dominant for many years. American chess champions were widely publicized. As a teenager, Beth was a natural for the cover of Life.
Taylor-Joy’s compelling performance eventually hooks our sympathy. We pull for her to avoid mistakes—in chess and in life. Is she in danger of missing the best match—romantically—through her hawkish focus on winning the next game? Is obsession always a form of madness? And with Alma as her role model, the girl who once demurely sipped Coke at dinner is tempted by stronger drink, dangerously so. Why do we sometimes embrace the things we know could destroy us?
The screenplay isn’t pitch perfect in replicating the way people spoke back then. Visually and sonically, “The Queen’s Gambit” ensconces Beth in a hyper-real version of the ‘60s, a world of teal upholstery, mandarin orange appliances and aggressively patterned wallpaper, where a Volkswagen Bug is apt to park behind another signature car from the era, a Ford Mustang. Herb Alpert is the soundtrack for her chess match in Mexico City, The Shocking Blue materialize on TV in Beth’s Lexington, KY home and a Kinks’ song (not a Top-40 hit in the U.S.) plays on the car radio. It’s a carefully curated bubble—perhaps like one a chess master might inhabit—untouched by news of Vietnam or the Kennedy and King assassinations. The civil rights movement is alluded to in the final episode when Beth’s black friend from the orphanage, Jolene (Moses Ingram), turns up, fulfilling the Hollywood archetype of the “soul sister” best friend.
“The Queen’s Gambit” ends on a feel-good note but for Beth, getting there was harrowing.
To read more I Hate Hollywood columns by David Luhrssen, click here.
