Bobby Fischer Against the World

For those who do not play chess or know anything about it, the game is something that is commonly referenced in books, poetry, movies, etc. It is seen as somewhat of a metaphor for happenings in real life. For those who play chess and are in love with the game, it is something of an art or science, or something cosmic that is unexplainable. They may often be frustrated as to why the majority of society does not share their passion.

Chess has survived for thousands of years and is arguably the hardest game in the world. Through the eons, if there is one name or one master that has towered above anyone else, it is the American Bobby Fischer. When Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in 1972, the match created more publicity than any other chess event in history (even more than when IBM's computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1996). A lone American had defeated the mighty Soviet chess machine during the cold war. What should have been just the beginning of an already great career for Fischer, it was actually just the end.

Bobby Fischer made one of the great disappearances of any famous person of the 20th century. He did not die, but was as elusive as Bigfoot after he won the world championship. For those who encountered him only would end of becoming frustrated because they realized he was slowly going insane. 20 years after winning the Championship (1992), Fischer reappeared to play Spassky for another match. When he appeared, it became even more obvious that the man had lost his mind. When the September 11th attacks happened, Fischer shocked the world when he applauded the acts on a radio program. He never played again and passed away in 2008.

This HBO program is fantastic in that it is presented in a manner that is suitable for those who barely know anything about chess or those who know the intricate details of Fischer's career and life. It keeps the viewers' attention by playing nice music in the background throughout. The program shows numerous photographs and television footage that most people have never seen. The central focus of the program is the Fischer - Spassky match of 1972, but it juxtaposes all kind of other topics such as Fischer's family and love life, and his affiliation with a cult group. The program even has Henry Kissinger talking about the match. Kissinger had encouraged Fischer to follow through with the match when Fischer was about to not show up. But, the program does not blame Fischer's religious obsession with chess for this mental breakdown. It posits that it could have been a possibility.

I will have to strongly disagree with one part of this documentary. It stated that when after Fischer won the world championship, he was arguably the most famous man in the world (aside from Jesus). I find this really hard to believe. One because Fischer was a merely just a chess champion and (2) there were many other gigantic figures at that time; Muhammad Ali, Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao, just to name a few.

In the end, the enigma will always remain the enigma. Nobody really knows why Fischer quit playing after 1972 or what caused his mental disintegration. Even though he forfeited his title to Karpov in 1975, why did he completely give up playing even tournaments and simuls altogether? What we are left is speculation. Many chess lovers will proudly proclaim that Fischer was the best player of all time. There maybe some truth to this, but I believe Garry Kasparov finally deserves this title. This is because Kasparov was willing to take on all comers, human beings or computers. Kasparov did this for almost 3 decades. Kasparov defeated an ongoing Champion Anatoly Karpov (one of the top 5 players ever) 5 times and he continued to defend this title beating brilliant and talented young players - Ivanchuck, Shirov, Topalov, Anand, Short, Leko, Kramnik, Kamsky, and so many others for another 2 decades.

*Please do not comment if you are going to get into a "greatest ever" debate - it will be yet another endless discussion and will lead to nowhere.* Fishcer's story is one of the great tragedies of chess, but in the short time that he was brilliant, he shined so brightly that it continues to illuminate to this day. Although his life ended to a sad decline, keep in mind, we remember and admire him for what he produced.

There is a telling scene in Liz Garbus's documentary of Bobby Fischer's life that takes place in Reykjavik the morning after he has beaten Soviet Boris Spassky to win the world championship. "Something inside me has changed", he tells a reporter. Indeed. Although his insane ravings about "the Jews", familiar to the audience even before the movie starts, were still years in the future, Garbus leaves little doubt that the seeds of Fischer's paranoia started the moment he won the title. And, as we are shown by Garbus's extraordinary use of historical footage and photographs, those seeds would take root in a psyche scarred irreparably by the life-long pursuit to be champion. In an earlier scene, Bobby recounts to an interviewer how he has wanted to be World Chess Champion "since I was seven years old". He never knew that there might be other goals in life. This fine and moving film is the story, then, of how, and at what cost, Bobby Fischer finally got his wish.

Garbus's formula is a standard one but succeeds brilliantly here. She juxtaposes archival footage and still photos (much of which, I believe, has never been shown publicly before) with contemporary interviews of many of the key players from Fischer's two-decade pursuit of the title. These individuals - fellow chess players (several of whom were his boyhood friends), tournament organizers, journalists, even his bodyguard - were all members of the small cadre of people that Bobby allowed into his life. Many were even part of his inner circle at Reykjavik. To a person, then, the interviewees were uniquely qualified to share their recollections of Bobby. But, beyond that, they had been positioned to gain some understanding of Bobby. In this film, they share that understanding, or at least their attempts at understanding, of who Bobby Fischer was, and more importantly, why he was that way.

One can only try to imagine the monumental effort required by Garbus to convince them to appear on camera. That she was even able to get Henry Kissinger (now a heavyweight in more ways than one) speaks volumes about her credibility. Kissinger's presence in the film is only one reminder of what was at stake in Reykjavik. Garbus reminds us that this was war: US versus the USSR, capitalism versus communism, freedom versus oppression, each could have been used to describe the battle. But in the end, the only one that really mattered was the title Garbus chose for her work: Bobby Fischer against the World.

Garbus filmed most of the interviews against stunning backdrops of wood-paneled libraries and polished marble floors. In that way she provides quite a contrast for some of the interviewees with their rumpled, 'haven't shaved in three days' look. By doing so, she heightens their humanity, and their humility. Bobby, by contrast, throughout the film, in his words and by his actions, only serves to confirm that he may not have had much of either.

Chess grandmasters Larry Evans and Anthony Saidy, who both knew Bobby since he was a little boy, are not just particularly articulate and insightful, but are also fonts of interesting 'Bobby facts'. Saidy tells us that when Bobby decided to camp out at Saidy's parents' home to avoid the press in the weeks leading up to the World Championship, Saidy's father was dying of cancer. "Bobby, about you staying with us, my dad is sick with cancer". "It's okay, I don't mind", replied the only slightly self absorbed Fischer.

Many of the interviews are with Europeans - Icelanders, Russians, Germans - and all reinforce how impressive it is to hear someone speak fluently in a language other than their native tongue. One has no doubts that their memories and minds must also be sharp. In this context, it is perhaps ironic that LIFE photographer and Scotsman Harry Benson's humanizing photos of Bobby, shown prominently on screen while he speaks, need no words to tell us all we need to know.

Two segments are, each, extraordinary. Saemi Parsson who was Bobby's bodyguard in Reykjavik tells the camera how, after not hearing a word from Bobby in 22 years ("not a peep"), he received the imprisoned Bobby's frantic phone call from Japan (the Japanese had detained Fischer at the request of the US). That Bobby chose to call Parsson, is not quite the correct statement. Rather, that Bobby had no one to call but Parsson seems closer to the truth. We are reminded by this episode that Bobby, by then, was not only stateless, but had severed all relationships with his family and friends. He was alone in more ways than one. The other segment is priceless and is comprised of a faded ABC Wide World of Sports TV special featuring noted sports artist LeRoy Neiman. Neiman, who expected to be "bored to pieces" by the match in Reykjavik draws Fischer as a matador skewering the hapless Spassky! But, can you imagine? ABC's Wide World of Sports? For chess? Such was the impact of Robert James Fischer.

Immediately after beating Spassky, Fischer began his life of seclusion. It may have been even sadder that he also effectively stopped playing chess at the same time, at age 29. All of us are familiar with Fischer's increasingly bizarre post-Reykjavik antics. Sometimes attributed to eccentricity, Garbus makes no secret that she believes Bobby's behaviour was a product of mental illness. Through the images and words of her film, she leaves no other way to label Bobby's paranoia and psychotic pronouncements. She puts the proof right there, in the flickering of a projector, for all to see. We wish it weren't so.

"Bobby Fischer Against the World" is a great title. I never met him, but all of the original news coverage offered in this excellent documentary offers memories that match the title exactly. There are two things I would have liked to see done differently. The cutting in and out of Bobby's speaking while on camera is a current trend, perhaps due to the limited attention span of today. I would have preferred to see him more often on screen uninterrupted as I remember it was originally presented. This gives a better picture of his obsession and of his complete personality. And second, the music, while more or less contemporary, was not in line with Bobby's tastes. He was a recluse and eschewed crowds, coverage, and pop culture. And, as a passing thought, wasn't it great to see network coverage of chess as a ... sport!

It's hard to imagine that a game of chess could capture the attention and imagination of millions; that a chess champion could become an international star, chased by the press and greeted like a hero on tarmacs around the world. Yet that is precisely what happened in the early Seventies, when the 29-year-old American Bobby Fischer took on the 35-year-old Russian Boris Spassky in the most notorious chess match in history: the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland.

This historical event is dramatically recounted in Liz Garbus' new documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World. The film explores the rise and fall of the chess world's bad boy: from a poor, self-taught child prodigy to a venerated world champion and, finally, a reviled paranoiac. The film divides Fischer's life into three parts, with the middle centring on that famed 1972 match in Reykjavik.

The trajectory that the film traces is rather clichéd, but along the way it does raise a number of intriguing questions: What is the nature of genius? What does it take to make a champion? What are the causes of mental illness? The film hints at how the young Bobby Fischer was affected by growing up without a father and being raised by a lefty mother in a poor Brooklyn household at the height of red-baiting. It looks at how fame affected Fischer, a recluse who cherished privacy, and it explores the nature of the game of chess itself, the mental as well as physical stamina it requires. The film also shows how Bobby and Boris became pawns (if willing ones) in the Cold War stand-off between the US and the USSR.

Considering its wide scope, it is neither surprising nor disappointing that Bobby Fischer Against the World raises more questions than it answers. Garbus largely leaves it to the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what to make Fischer's life and personality. The documentary intersperses newsreel footage, still images by photographer Harry Benson (who was granted unique access to Fischer), and talking heads that include Henry Kissinger, Fischer's brother-in-law, his chess contemporaries, various fans and historians.

One of the interviewees refers to Fischer as 'the Mozart of chess'. Indeed, he started teaching himself the game at the age of six, spending all his free time studying strategies and playing against himself. Just a few years later he was frequenting chess clubs in Manhattan and soon he was taking on up to 40 adults at a time. At 14, he became the youngest US Open Champion ever.

By contrast, Spassky's home country was a place that talent-spotted, honed and coached their chess players. In the Soviet Union, chess was not just a sophisticated boardgame, but a matter of collective, national pride.

So when the two players went up against each other in Iceland, the match was loaded with symbolism. As another chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, says in the film, Fischer was 'representing the entire free world'. At the time, an American TV news bulletin put the latest news about Fischer above the Watergate scandal and soaring unemployment in the US. And when the notoriously demanding and elusive chess champion at first failed to show up in Iceland, Kissinger himself called Fischer up, urging him to go.

In an interview after his World Championship win, Fischer said he felt like something had been taken out of him. Having achieved the ultimate accolade, Fischer became more and more of a recluse and failed to defend his title three years later. For the chess world, this was a great betrayal.

Fischer only resurfaced for a bizarre 'comeback' 20 years later in a 1992 re-match against Spassky in the former Yugoslavia, which was then under United Nations sanctions. Fischer ended up winning the rematch, but the price was high. He was indicted by the United States for defying a presidential ban against commercial dealings with Yugoslavia, facing fines and a 10-year prison sentence if he returned. His old friend and bodyguard managed to secure him citizenship in Iceland, where he died in 2008.

When he returned to the public eye in 1992, Fischer was wild-haired, podgy and virulently anti-Semitic. Although both his parents were Jews, Fischer got mired in conspiracy theories, reading pamphlets about the Illuminati and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In a radio phone-in just after 9/11 he gloated over the Twin Tower attacks. Having been paraded in front of cameras as an American hero as a child, and taken pride in beating the Russians as a young man, at the end of his life Fischer was an outcast and a self-made enemy of the state.

Bobby Fischer Against the World suggests that there is something about the game of chess that not only attracts, but also contains or focuses great minds. As an interviewee in the documentary notes 'A good chess player is paranoid on the board, but then if you take that paranoia to real life it doesn't play so well'. Once chess was no longer his sole obsession, Fischer seems to have begun to imagine that there were some hidden strategies behind people's every move. And he is not the only who comes off as paranoid in the film. In the course of the 21 individual games that Fischer and Spassky played during those three summer months in Iceland, Spassky claimed that his opponent was using electronic and chemical devices to control and unsettle him. A thorough police search of the room where the match took place failed to find any such devices.

In the end, Garbus' film makes no excuses for Fischer's despicable views while at the same time showing that, regardless of his disappointing private ending, Fischer's remarkable achievements still remain an inspiration.

Bobby Fischer Against the World (2010)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Another very good documentary from HBO, this one taking a look at the life and career of Bobby Fischer, the chess genius who rose to fame at an early age and really put the sport on the U.S. map when he defeated the Russian Spassky in 1972. Fischer's rise was quickly put out when he refused to defend his championship and the genius spent the rest of his life trying to hide from the public and apparently driving closer to madness. David Edmonds, Dr. Anthony Saidy, Susan Polgar, Henry Kissinger, David Shenk, Malcolm Gladwell and Larry Evans are among the many people interviewed here as they try to explain what made Fischer a genius but also what eventually got him kick out of America. This is a very fascinating documentary because it really seems to be trying to tell the truth and not just sugar-coat some rather troubled moments in this man's life. It's clear that he was a genius at the game of chess and the documentary makes an interesting choice showing other great minds of the game who ended their lives in a mental breakdown. The majority of the running time is devoted to the Spassky match as we get a game-to-game breakdown of events, shown the important matches and also the various controversies that Fischer stirred up at the time. So, in reality, even in his greatest moments Fischer was still delivering controversy and upsetting people. Fans of chess, Fischer or those just interesting in great documentaries should really be entertained by this thing. The documentary doesn't really explain the rules of chess so some might want to read up a bit before going into the film but even if you know nothing the story is just so fascinating where it really doesn't matter.