Butler's Cinema Scene

Anna Taylor-Joy

“THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT”  My rating: A- (Now on Netflix)

Anya Taylor-Joy has been an indie “it” girl ever since 2015’s “The Witch”; she cemented her reputation with this year’s “Emma” (and took a half-step back with the widely reviled “New Mutants”).

But true blow-out mainstream stardom now has arrived for her in the form of “The Queen’s Gambit,” a personality study masquerading as a sports movie (well, sort of…the sport here is chess).

Scott Frank’s seven-part Netflix series (he directed and wrote or co-wrote every episode) allows the 24-year-old Taylor-Joy to exploit everything in her acting arsenal, from her eerie looks (those HUGE eyes, those rosebud lips) to explosive physicality to a sort of studied inscrutability that is her character’s dominant trait.

Along the way the series (adapted from Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel) tackles issues of feminism and paternalism, Cold War tension, substance abuse and Sixties hedonism.  Oh, yeah…and  you’ll learn an awful lot about the world of competitive chess.

The first chapter introduces us to young Beth Harrison (played as a child by Isla Johnston) in the wake of the suicidal car wreck that killed her single mother (Chloe Pirrie, who keeps popping up in flashbacks scattered throughout the episodes).

Little Beth is consigned to a church-sponsored orphanage where she’s fed a steady diet of religion and tranquilizers (the beginning of lifelong addiction issues), is befriended by the older malcontent Jolene (Moses Ingram) and finds an unlikely mentor in the school’s reclusive janitor (the great Bill Camp) who in the dingy cellar introduces her to the game of chess — at which she excels. 

“The Queen’s Gambit” follows two distinct but frequently intersecting paths.

The first is Beth’s rise to the highest ranks of international chess, starting with state competitions (she knows the game, but is indifferent to the attendant proprieties), through state championships and on to the nationals. Frank and team pull out the stops in recreating the milieu of chess fantacism.  By the time you’re finished you’ll have been given a crash course.

The second plot is a more personal one. It’s about Beth as damaged goods, a loner who gets by on ego, skill, booze and pills;  a teen who seems unable to establish the  usual connections and friendships.

Beth is adopted by a couple whose motives for becoming parents are mixed at best;  the father almost immediately bails, leave Beth to deal with his depressed, alcoholic and delightfully loquacious wife, Alma (Marielle Heller). You can say this for Alma…despite the constant drinking she’s knows how to monetize Beth’s chess skills; before long the teenager is popping up on the covers of magazines.

Isla Johnston, Bill Camp

Here’s the thing about Beth.  She enjoys getting high and (once she starts winning money) has a terrific fashion sense (most of the film is set in the 1960s), but mostly she eats, drinks and breathes chess.  A solitary creature, she spends most of her day bent over a board, studying moves, or reading countless books about chess theory and various aspects of the game. (Who knew that every chess match has a “middle game” in which players jockey to set up their last-act attacks?)

During tournament play Beth is so calmly confidant as to be both infuriating and intimidating. She’s donned a shroud of self-fulfilling invincibility — which makes her rare losses all the more traumatic.

Sometimes Beth blows off steam by getting really stoned and dancing to pop music in the living room. Sometimes she’s so blotto she forgets what day it is.

Boys?  Well, there are some.  But only boys who can take a beating from a girl and come back for more. Though set in a sexist, pre-feminism era, the young male chess players in “The Queen’s Gambit” are surprisingly open to being schooled by Beth.  No doubt mastery of the chess board is a turn-on for these guys (I was going to say “dweebs,” but not all of them are that hopeless). She’s like the only cute girl at a Dungeons and Dragons conclave.

Among the men in Beth’s life are the sincere (to the point of boring) Harry (Harry Malling), who having been beaten by her tries to coach her on to ever great coups; D.L. (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), to whom she would willingly give up her virginity…except that he’s apparently gay; and chess bad-boy Bennie (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), who sports a leather cowboy hat and black wardrobe and can wax endlessly about the subtleties of the game.

Ultimately “The Queen’s Gambit” is about Beth letting down her guard enough to let others help her. This theme comes to a head in a world championship in Moscow where our heroine faces the world’s greatest player (Marcin Dorocinski) with the help of late-night, long-distance telephone calls to her adoring guy buddies in NYC, who are spending their days studying the master’s past games and creating scenarios for Beth to memorize before each day’s match begins.

By the time “The Queen’s Gambit” ends Beth is still only 20 years old. You’ve got to wonder if this isn’t a case of peaking too early.  Having conquered the chess world, what’s left for her? 

Holding everything together is Taylor-Joy’s mesmerizing, perplexing, elusive performance. The wonder here is that by the time it’s over we feel we at last understand this young woman who may be incapable of fully understanding herself.

| Robert W. Butler