"The Queen's Gambit"

 

Count me among those who admired The Queen's Gambit and the lead performance by Anya Taylor-Joy, with some reservations about the tidy ending.

Based on the novel by Walter Tevis, and written and directed by Scott Frank (screenwriter of Logan, Out of Sight and The Lookout), the seven-part Netflix tale is about Beth Harmon, troubled orphan whose only joy in life in the '60s comes from being phenomenal at chess. And even that joy, it turns out, has its limits. It is beautifully shot, with a dazzling fashion sense and a fine period soundtrack.

Its use of Classical Gas has brought new attention to that Mason Williams gem, for example, and a recent peek at Georgie Fame's Yeh Yeh on YouTube saw at least one comment relating to its use in Queen's Gambit. 

Fashion, meanwhile, has had my Facebook friends envying Beth's super-fashionable wardrobe; clothes in the show are at once defining and defiant. For Beth, the expensive outfits break her free from the plain clothes of her orphanage and the drabness her adoptive mother insists on. They also set her apart even more in competitions where she is the rare female by highlighting her gender through a stylishness not seen in most men. Aware early on that people are more interested in her as a female chess player than as a great chess player, she offers up a magazine-cover-friendly look that plays up her celebrity.

Not that she is the only one defined by the clothes.  Her major Russian foe, for example, masks his unconventional play with the blandness of dark suits while her sometime rival and friend Benny Watts affects a long-coated, gunslinger-like look that is at once classic American and a style apart from other American players with no sense of fashion. 

As for the acting, I had seen Taylor-Joy in Emma, which I enjoyed but which did not stick in memory the way her work in this production does. She can change an entire scene with the tiniest twitch of an eyebrow, or look deadpan to those around her while revealing enormous depth to the camera. The supporting cast is also solid, including Bill Camp as Mr. Shaibel, Beth's first chess mentor, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Benny Watts. (You may remember him as Sam in Love Actually.) 

The chess is engrossing but not overly complicated for the newcomer -- or for bad former players such as myself. Some of my interest in this production stemmed from old chess connections: an old portable set I have that belonged to my father, being a faculty sponsor for a chess club when I taught high school (the students asked me to sponsor because they needed someone to drive them to matches), occasional dips into the mysteries of chess books, a love of wonderful chess movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.

But the greater strength in Queen's Gambit is in the characters, centrally Beth, and the struggle to balance an incredible skill with a tattered and repeatedly shattered life away from the chessboard.  We could argue that to have a character as deeply flawed as Beth get the ending this provides is a bit much, but the show mostly earns it when she is finally allowed some catharsis. And, as a whole, this works very, very well.