Butler's Cinema Scene

“BROOKLYN CASTLE” My rating: B (Opens Jan. 11 at the Tivoli)

101 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

The cool kids at Brooklyn’s I.S. 318 aren’t football players or cheerleaders. They’re chess nerds.

For more than 20 years the adolescent chess enthusiasts from this middle school have dominated the game, winning national championship after national championship.

Katie Dellamaggiore’s documentary follows these kids – the vast majority from impoverished families — over a couple of years, getting into the ethos that has made the 318’s chess team so successful while chronicling the NYC public school budget crunch that threatens not just the chess players but virtually all after-school activities.

Like “Spellbound” (about kids preparing for the national spelling bee) and “Mad Hot Ballroom” (New York small fry gearing up for a ballroom dance competition), “Brooklyn Castle” benefits from young, amusing, enthusiastic subjects, built-in suspense (who’ll walk away with the trophies?), and a conviction that our future rests with our young people.

I don’t think it’s as good as film as those other two examples of the genre. Perhaps I’ve been down this cinematic road a few too many times already…or maybe it has something to do with my own lack of interest in the game.

In any case, “Brooklyn Castle” didn’t ring my emotional bells as soundly as those earlier efforts.

But it is nevertheless informative and inspiring, and it introduces us to some wonderful young people.

Like Rochelle Ballantyne, who wants to become the first African-American female chess master and has the skill to pull it off – providing she can find the determination to study the game when she’d rather be off doing adolescent things.

Or Justus, who at age 11 is one of the highest ranked minors in the game but who finds himself collapsing beneath  everyone’s high expectations (he is just 11, after all). Patrick is a seventh-grader who without chess would be a classic outsider…he hopes the game will help him beat his case of attention deficit disorder. And then there’s Alexis, determined to get into the right high school so that he can get a great job and pay back his hard-working immigrant parents.

And perhaps the most infectious personality in any film this year comes in the form of Pobo, a physically imposing but astonishingly sweet-tempered hustler who already has his mind set on the U.S. presidency (he runs for class office as “Pobama”).  He’s an OK chess player, but his great skill is that of leader and organizer, encouraging younger players and making the game even more fun for his fellows.

We also meet the adults – administrators and teachers – who have nurtured the chess program and now must find ways to trim 10 percent of their annual budget (thanks to the economic collapse of 2008) while still maintaining quality eduation and programs like chess, art, music, and drama.

| Robert W. Butler