“The Queen’s Gambit: a review.”
The essential place of compassion.
JANUARY 7—The Queen’s Gambit has been out now for a couple of months on Netflix. In a word, it is brilliant in every way—plot, acting, contextual relevance, and historical accuracy. It is a challenge to attempt to review this complex series without spoilers. But I introduce it to people who might not otherwise be particularly inclined to see it—as I was not until friends strongly recommended it. I was hooked from the first episode. It is no wonder The Queen’s Gambit, a study of character, of struggle against poor odds, has topped U.S. audience response charts.
The series is inspiring in an endearingly old-fashioned sense. While it is neither moralistic nor judgmental, it certainly has something to say to us today. A young woman flirts with real dangers while growing up in unusually confronting circumstances. More and more, she comes to see that she is being helped along the way by the love and compassion of other people, people who, at the same time, are trying to find a way through their own problems and insecurities. The story sends a message that none of us is perfect but that we do better when we set out to support one another and work in teams. In other words, society matters. There is a subtle—almost invisible—international dimension to this theme.
It is the mid-fifties in Kentucky. Beth Harmon, an only child of two brilliant academics in a failed marriage, has miraculously survived her mother’s murder-suicide road accident. After the crash Beth is sent to a bleak Christian orphanage. She is around nine years old. Beth spends some years there, until, at around 15, she is adopted by a troubled family. (The orphanage lies that she is 13 to improve her chances.)
The little girl has befriended the orphanage janitor, a lonely middle-aged man. He secretly teaches her chess, which becomes her mental escape from the austerity and dullness of orphanage life and, later on, the challenges of her adoptive home. Her progressing chess skills open up opportunities, even as Beth struggles with loneliness and growing drug dependency. Her road takes her forward into the strange world of competitive professional chess.
One is struck by Beth’s magnetic character. We see her growing from an insecure ugly duckling into an assured and stylish swan. She learns from the interesting and generally decent men and women she encounters on the way. This is a moving story of personal growth from inauspicious beginnings and despite real character vulnerabilities. To my relief, there are no obvious predators in this story, though one feels they were lurking never far away from the vulnerable Beth.
The Queen’s Gambit is based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, who drew on his own experience as a middle-grade chess player; so there is lived experience here. The film nostalgically evokes the decent but dull 1950s white middle-class Midwestern America: a time when most people were neither affluent nor poor and people walked to do their shopping in high-street stores. A time when international hotels, where the higher-level chess tournaments were played, really did offer spacious and stylish escapes from suburban reality. A time when air travel was glamorous and flight attendants served real, freshly mixed Martinis to cabin-class passengers.
Was it ever really as good as this? Yes, it was: I do remember international travel as an impressionable young diplomat in the late 1960s.
Chess is the vehicle and metaphor for Beth’s personal growth to adulthood. This is where the story inspires. As an average player of the school chess club sort, I can just connect with the excitement of these advanced games that we see on the way: the ruthlessly competitive chess protocols, offset by the chivalry and grace of the game.
Beth as a young woman commands the scene, an intuitive chess prodigy who fascinates and changes the lives of those who encounter her. Played brilliantly by Anya Taylor–Joy (whom some will remember from the Jane Austin series Emma), she combines steely toughness, a wary sexiness, and a heartrending vulnerability in equal measure. We want her to win in life, but we fear she is about to lose. Disaster always seems just around the corner.
It being the early 1960’s as The Queen’s Gambit proceeds through time, and chess being the Russian game par excellence, a theme of U.S.–Soviet Cold War competition—relevant again today, of course—absorbingly pervades the story.
Does Beth win? In her chess career and in her life? Watch and see .... but try to avoid spoiler reviews beforehand.
Tony Kevin is a former Australian ambassador, an emeritis fellos at Australian National University, and the author of Return to Moscow (U.W.A., 2017).