This was clearly done on a very low budget and it shows in the production values; it is clearly an attempt to tell a story about a compelling and tragic individual by people who don't know anything much about chess - but that's not what I hold against this film.
It is presented in a pseudo-documentary style - the attention to detail and accuracy in recreating some existing news footage and interviews with Bobby is uncanny.
That suggests an intention to veracity that unfortunately is utterly lacking - the rest of the story is so far removed (if not utterly contradictory to) the facts of Bobby's biography that the slice of life recreations are all the more frustrating.
Bobby's mother is portrayed as a pyschotic, paranoid schizophrenic who abandons Bobby and disappears from his life entirely when he was still a teenager - when she was in fact a loving, intelligent, accomplished, if somewhat eccentric woman who never abandoned a son she clearly loved and attempted to support throughout his entire, troubled life. (She financially supported him during his "wilderness years" after the 72 world championship when the money ran out and he lived on skid row in Los Angeles and remained in contact with him --- on affectionate terms - throughout his entire life.
Bobby is portrayed as harboring violent and generically racist views (not just against the Jews, but against blacks) from a very young age, when his particular and virulent pathology was limited to the Jews, and emerged slowly and steadilly throughout his life, in a crescendo of truly horrifying scope by the end. In the end, that hatred did encompass a broad swath of humanity, but only because in his mind they were manipulated and controlled by a vast, global Jewish conspiracy.
OK, so it isn't a work of non-fiction, despite its pretensions to suggest it is. But even if you allow for artistic license with historical reality, it is so poorly done that it lacks any coherence even if you try to accept it on its own terms.
Even the conceit of the researching journalist is ham fisted and illogical. We get a tearful epiphany from the journalist late in the film when he confesses he understands Fischer because he is so much like Fischer, when there is absolutely NO nexus: how does being an otherwise stable and adjusted professional who went to pieces and to drink over the death of his infant son form any basis for understanding even the fictional grasp of Fischer that the film created? (A genius at the chess board, suffering from abandonment by a father he never new and a schizo mother?) So it utterly fails even on the entirely fictional terms it lays out.
The plot itself is also devoid of logic or coherence. Even if you skip over the implausability of this writer being selected to do this book, out of the blue ...we have to swallow the plot device of the writer traveling to Moscow for research (a questionable plot device on its face) where he is sought out and found by a fictional woman who knew Bobby in Rejkiavic. What the hell was she doing in Moscow and how did she know where to find the writer there? The newsreel recreations are fun ... but not enough to make this mess of a film worth enduring.
It is presented in a pseudo-documentary style - the attention to detail and accuracy in recreating some existing news footage and interviews with Bobby is uncanny.
That suggests an intention to veracity that unfortunately is utterly lacking - the rest of the story is so far removed (if not utterly contradictory to) the facts of Bobby's biography that the slice of life recreations are all the more frustrating.
Bobby's mother is portrayed as a pyschotic, paranoid schizophrenic who abandons Bobby and disappears from his life entirely when he was still a teenager - when she was in fact a loving, intelligent, accomplished, if somewhat eccentric woman who never abandoned a son she clearly loved and attempted to support throughout his entire, troubled life. (She financially supported him during his "wilderness years" after the 72 world championship when the money ran out and he lived on skid row in Los Angeles and remained in contact with him --- on affectionate terms - throughout his entire life.
Bobby is portrayed as harboring violent and generically racist views (not just against the Jews, but against blacks) from a very young age, when his particular and virulent pathology was limited to the Jews, and emerged slowly and steadilly throughout his life, in a crescendo of truly horrifying scope by the end. In the end, that hatred did encompass a broad swath of humanity, but only because in his mind they were manipulated and controlled by a vast, global Jewish conspiracy.
OK, so it isn't a work of non-fiction, despite its pretensions to suggest it is. But even if you allow for artistic license with historical reality, it is so poorly done that it lacks any coherence even if you try to accept it on its own terms.
Even the conceit of the researching journalist is ham fisted and illogical. We get a tearful epiphany from the journalist late in the film when he confesses he understands Fischer because he is so much like Fischer, when there is absolutely NO nexus: how does being an otherwise stable and adjusted professional who went to pieces and to drink over the death of his infant son form any basis for understanding even the fictional grasp of Fischer that the film created? (A genius at the chess board, suffering from abandonment by a father he never new and a schizo mother?) So it utterly fails even on the entirely fictional terms it lays out.
The plot itself is also devoid of logic or coherence. Even if you skip over the implausability of this writer being selected to do this book, out of the blue ...we have to swallow the plot device of the writer traveling to Moscow for research (a questionable plot device on its face) where he is sought out and found by a fictional woman who knew Bobby in Rejkiavic. What the hell was she doing in Moscow and how did she know where to find the writer there? The newsreel recreations are fun ... but not enough to make this mess of a film worth enduring.