Underneath all of Liz Garbus's documentary films, which she has been making for nearly two decades now, lies a fascination with psychological cause-and-effect, and how institutions and social constraints not only enable but also exacerbate mental conditions. Films like The Execution of Wanda Jean and Girlhood dealt with the spider webs that tie mental abuse and disorders, poverty and crime, but she also found time to consider the psychological after-effects of those who awoke from comas brought upon by traumatic brain injuries in her 2007 film, Coma. The direct correlation between behavior and the brain, and how that behavior is perceived in society, remains her focus to this day. In these terms, Bobby Fischer Against The World is at once the director's most accomplished and entrancing film to date, revealing her as a director capable of balancing her social agendas with deft reportage and a genuine sense for entertainment. As such, the trials of Bobby Fischer, the Chicago-born, New York-raised chess prophet who is widely regarded as the greatest player the game has ever seen, is initially structured in a fashion not unlike many sports docs. We get the rough early days living in a small Brooklyn apartment with his single, disinterested mother and loving sister; the spark of interest that began his obsession with the rooks and pawns; the confused bereavement over not knowing who his real father was; the ascension into the upper echelons of the competitive chess circuit, bringing him to become the United States champion at the age of 14.
All of this information is smartly compressed and is efficiently moved through, thanks in no small part to Garbus's work with experienced editors Michael Levine and the late Karen Schmeer. It makes for a brisk introduction and opens the door for Garbus to spend a great deal of her film's first hour focusing on Fischer's monumental match with Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky, properly referred to as the "Match of the Century." Played out in Reykjavik, Iceland, Garbus presents the match as a miniature of the Cold War, at once high-stakes, petty, unremitting, and gripping. What began with an amateur mistake that lost Fischer the first round -- a mistake Fischer at least partially blames on the cameras being used in the auditorium -- ends with playing so studied and brilliant that even Spassky stood up and applauded Fischer, before conceding the match to his American opponent.
Garbus frames Fischer's victory with a knowing sense of dread, highlighting his willingness to do the media circuit but also his blatantly apparent unease in the public eye. The director's vast and varied collection of talking heads, which includes Fischer's erstwhile bodyguard, Dick Cavett, and more than a few of Fischer's chess-playing disciples, accentuates the mood, especially after her subject forfeits his title after only one year, and when Fischer's membership in the evangelical Worldwide Church of God is honed-in on, the haunting possibilities of his obsessive, intricate thought process come into glaring relief. When the church is essentially revealed as a fraud, Fischer descends into the abyss of governmental paranoia, covering his windows with tin foil, adopting an unsettlingly intense anti-Semitism (despite or, more accurately, in spite of being born a Jew) and going into seclusion.
When he emerges, at the urging of a young Hungarian fan and object of desire, Fischer need only indulge in a rematch with Spassky in Yugoslavia, in direct opposition to the UN's Yugoslavia embargo, to send his anti-Semitism and burgeoning anti-Americanism into overdrive; one need not be reminded of the revolting glee he was content to spout on a Japanese radio talk show after 9/11. It is not hard to see that Garbus's interest in Fischer's days of isolation in Japan and, later, Iceland is nearly as impassioned as her interest in his early triumphs, which makes her film all the more nuanced and disturbing. Yet, she never loses sight of the genius in Fischer in the milieu of his ugly tendencies and the conspiratorial itch that it would seem he was born with -- his mother had an FBI file nearly the length of "Infinite Jest." The last known available image of Fischer, hidden under a thick, white beard and a crooked smile, works hard to dissolve our memory of the brilliant son that riveted America, but I cannot say that it succeeds.
