Bobby Fischer Against the World (Liz Garbus, 2011)

Chess like the mathematical and musical fields (and unlike such fields as literature which require an understanding of the world and a mature outlook) periodically produces child prodigies and there is no better example of a chess wunderkind than Bobby Fischer. Today, if asked to name a world famous chess player most people would name Fischer, if any at all. Partly this is down to his epic 1972 championship in Reykjavik as the much as the curious path his life took after 1972. Liz Garbus's documentary film follows many recent narrative documentaries such as Man on Wire or One Day In September in mixing archive footage with recent interviews with the leading players, commentators and ordinary people who witnessed events at the time.

The film follow three acts with his early years leading up to 1972, the 1972 World Championship, and finally Bobby Fischer's decline and fall from grace. It seems inevitable that his odd and eccentric upbringing could produce a chess genius such as Fischer. What is also inevitable is that that same hothouse upbringing sowed the seeds of his downfall. Having no real interests outside chess he would spend hours every day practising chess, reading chess books, playing games against himself at the age of 15 he became the United States Chess Champion. Early interviews show a diffident boy seemingly overwhelmed by the attention but also showing the first glimmers of an ultimately arrogant and difficult man. We also see that even in the early 1960s he was fascinated with the conspiracy theories that later took over his life as he talks about the dangers of radiation from TV sets and fluoridation of drinking water. This delusional behaviour became worse over time culminating in the full-scale paranoia, if not outright madness.

Never an easy man to be around he never was one to do the expected thing or follow the usual career path that those around him wanted for him. When he was readying himself for the 1972 match against the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky it was almost as if the Cold War were being fought by proxy complete with accusations of psychological warfare from both sides. Fischer seemed to resent the responsibility that he was being asked to shoulder and almost never made it to Iceland. Henry Kissinger, the soon-to-be US Secretary of State, personally intervened to try to persuade him to go. Even when he got to Reykjavik it was a moot point whether he'd meet Spassky across the chessboard. He was an hour late for the first game and failed to turn up for the second, thus automatically forfeiting the game. Two games down he pulled back his passive-agressive behaviour a little and began to win his games. This middle section is fascinating: a chess championship that made world headline news, even managing to push Watergate from the top story for a while. Fischer won the championship in typically muted fashion and refused (yet again) the done thing: the fanfare and ticker-tape parades that others may have seen as his right after his apotheosis at Reykjavik. Instead he immediately entered what the headline writers like to call "the wilderness years" where he tried to return to obscurity all the while allying himself with one crakpot idea after another. It was also around this time that the son of a Jewish mother (and probably a Jewish father) started publically spouting the virulent anti-semitism which blighted his legacy.

While watching the film I was reminded of the recent book "Perfect Rigor" by Masha Gessen about the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman, an equally eccentric genius who like Fischer gave it all up when it seemed that he could have capitalised on his recent triumph. (Perelman was awarded the $1 million Clay Millennium Prize after solving the Poincare Conjecture - he refused the prize and turned his back on mathematics.)

The question of whether it was chess that drove him mad is left unanswered. Thankfully the notoriousness of such things as his ridicule of the US at the time of 9/11 and attack on the World Trade Centre is kept at a minimum and is not allowed to overshadow his achievements on the chessboard. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said "there are no second acts in American lives." It is a tragic waste of talent.

Dying from acute renal failure and refusing life-saving medical treatment his last words were reputedly "Nothing is as healing as the human touch." He is buried in Iceland, the country where he saw his greatest triumph and which following his trouble with US immigration granted him citizenship.

It's as if Bobby Fischer's life was Nabokov's The Luzhin Defence as rewritten by Philip Roth: the chess genius who loses his mind and becomes a scabrous self-hating Jew fulminating against the world and all those in it who fail to recognise his genius.

A real American Tragedy indeed.