The Queen’s Gambit 2020 Netflix streaming

 

When I was around 12, my old dying scary bubbie came to stay with us in our cramped apartment in Brooklyn for a few weeks. She was really sick and it was summer and it was hot. My parents made me stay home and watch over her while they were working at our luncheonette a few blocks away. I didn’t like her, and I certainly didn’t love her but I was trapped. We had no air conditioning that summer and to help me with this awful business my cousin Butchie who was maybe a year older than me came over from his house in Carnarsie to keep watch with me. We were bored and hot and one day we found my older brother’s chess set. Neither of us knew how to play, but we decided we would teach ourselves the game with the help of the book that came with the set. We did the work and we did teach ourselves the rules more or less of this complicated game. Over the years I would casually play with whomever I could wrangle to sit down with me. I didn’t play a lot. Not too many friends knew how to play or wanted to learn how to play, so I tossed the game into my memory box and didn’t think much about it. All of this chess stuff came back to me the other week as I watched the 7 part series “The Queen’s Gambit”  streaming on Netflix that is based on a novel by Walter Tevis the same guy who wrote “The Hustler” this time using chess instead of pool as a metaphor for life’s challenges that are mostly filled with despair and heartbreak. 

The series opens in 1967 with a startling scene of a young woman rising out of a bathtub drenched and confused, rushing to get dressed and out the door for an important chess tournament. I have to be careful now not to give too much away so that all the pleasures and charms of this series will be yours to discover and enjoy. The background story of the heroine is almost Dickensonian in the details. A frail fragile gentle young girl is left motherless by a terrible accident and on top of that she is also abandoned  by her father. She is placed in a  typical nasty orphanage for girls somewhere in Kentucky. The young child named Beth Harmon and played with great cheek and sorrow by Isla Johnston is bewitched for some reason by chess and is taken under the wing and watch by the handy man janitor who is a good player of the game. Acted by the marvelous character actor Bill Camp we are put off a bit by him, I mean what is he up to in his spooky cellar at the home.  He’s gruff and off-putting and also impatient and weary of giving lessons to the child but he finally gives in and becomes her teacher and mentor.

Its now a few years later, and the child is now a young teenager, a young woman even and in a strange bit of affairs she is adopted by a middle age couple and once again we are left to wonder exactly what is going on. The mom is looking for a companion, a friend and she is wonderfully  played by Marielle Heller who is superb, wounded and sad. Heller is also a writer and a director  (she did “Diary of A Teenage Girl” “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” “And A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood.”) Again a father leaves and the adopted young girl and mom bond in some startling and touching ways, and these sequences are some of the most moving mother-daughter impressions I think I’ve ever seen in a movie. The years move on and the young girl starts to enter chess tournaments and starts to win them, becoming a chess star but she is also becoming addicted to drugs and booze which some have said is not a good match for playing chess. I don’t know. Its only a movie Ingrid, and a smart, funny and good one at that. Beth is now played  by Anya Taylor-Joy, in what is commonly called a breakthrough star making role and a quick glance at her IMDB page shows that her dance card is indeed booked up for a long time to come. This is a great performance, rich in nuance and substance and it’s so much fun just to watch her move and walk, change and struggle, survive and win. People come and go, chess friends, all men, some lovers, male and female and trips and voyages around the world and in her life. Old friends re-appear and the story closes in a somewhat melodramatic predictable storybook way. The look of the film and the period details should please, especially so with the clothes which are lovely. I did have a problem with the wigs which sometimes looked ill fitted and obvious, but the interiors and the filming itself is lush, colorful and eye catching. Written and directed by Scott Frank who is mostly known as a screenwriter, this series is heading for lots of love and awards.