Scott Frank’s seven-part adaptation of Walter Tevis’s novel makes chess look like a knife fight, and Anya Taylor-Joy carries it. Handsome, clever and a pleasure, it is also gentler with its heroine than the pills and the vodka should allow.
Scott Frank’s seven-part adaptation of Walter Tevis’s novel, created with Allan Scott, is about a girl who learns chess in the basement of a Kentucky orphanage and grows up to play the Russians. It has the shape of a sports film: one tournament after another, each opponent a little more frightening than the last, and it does that job well. It is also handsome, well cast and easy to watch in a way that is not entirely to its credit. We enjoyed it a great deal and finished it thinking it had let its heroine off lightly.
The hardest thing about a chess drama is the chess, and Frank solves it. Steven Meizler shoots the games from above and from the players’ eye line, then cuts to hands, clocks and faces, so that we always know who is winning without needing to know how. Michelle Tesoro’s editing does the rest: a slapped clock, an intake of breath, a pen scratching a move onto a scoresheet. Carlos Rafael Rivera’s score, mostly piano and low strings, hurries under the fast games and drops out for the slow ones. We were prepared to be patient with these scenes and found we did not need to be.
The image that got at us came before any tournament. Beth, nine years old and dosed on the orphanage’s pills, lies in bed and looks up, and the pieces appear on the ceiling, upside down, moving where she tells them. Meizler lights them like a chandelier over a dormitory of sleeping girls. It is the one place the series shows us what the game is to her, a room she can go into where nothing can be taken away, and it moved us more than we expected.
Anya Taylor-Joy takes over when Beth is adopted and plays her for the remaining six episodes with little fuss. She does none of the tics that usually signal genius on television. She sits still, watches, and lets her opponents talk themselves out. When she loses, and she does lose, the disappointment is small and private, a hand going out to knock over her own king. Some critics have found her cold. We think cold is the part, and that Taylor-Joy knows exactly when to let it slip, usually in a hotel room with a bottle.
Uli Hanisch’s production design and Gabriele Binder’s costumes carry the years. The tournaments are hotel ballrooms with folding tables and paper name cards, each a little grander than the last. Binder dresses Beth in checks and then in bolder checks, until by the later episodes she is walking about in the board itself. It is a neat joke and the series does not overplay it.
What it does overplay is its own kindness. Beth drinks, takes pills and wakes up on floors, and none of it costs her a game she was going to win anyway. The men she beats, one after another, turn into friends, coaches and lovers within an episode of losing to her. We were bored through a stretch in the middle, where Frank lets scenes of Beth alone in hotel rooms run long, and then we were annoyed, because a series about compulsion ought to be harder on the compulsive. Her adoptive mother, a lonely woman with a piano she no longer plays, is the only character allowed to be sad without a plan, and that performance is the one the series most needs and least advertises.
Tevis also wrote The Hustler, and this is that story with the pool hall swapped for a ballroom and the losses made cheaper. The book’s Beth pays for things. Frank’s Beth is forgiven, repeatedly, by a script that loves her, and the seventh episode is written as a reward rather than a reckoning. We will not say how it goes, only that we saw it coming from the third.
It is a 15 certificate, for the pills and the drinking rather than anything that happens at a board. Watch it two episodes at a time rather than in one sitting; the games are better when you have not just seen six of them, and the hotel rooms are worse.
