The Queen’s Gambit

I know two things about chess. (1) I know how each piece moves. (2) I know that I totally suck at it. Many years ago I walked right into a Fool’s Mate, and I haven’t touched a chess piece since. So believe me, you don’t even have to know (1) to enjoy this seven-part series from Netflix. It is not really about chess, it could have been a story about almost any sort of competition.

It tells of a girl, Beth Harmon, whose mother dies in a car accident and is sent to live in an orphanage. This isn’t Oliver Twist territory, it’s decently run, though soul-less and not a place you’d like to grow up in. She stumbles on the janitor, a chess buff, in the basement, playing games with himself. She learns it all by observing, eventually persuades him to teach her stuff, and soon is beating him all the time. She moves on to a college, where she awes the boys by beating the entire chess club simultaneously. Clearly, she is a prodigy. But at the same time she becomes addicted to the tranquillizers that are given to each girl every day. (This is in the 1950s.) When the state outlaws the practice, she crashes, hard.

Then we follow her through ups and downs on her way to becoming a grand master, beating the top Russian guy. Beth is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who Wiki describes as an American-born Argentine-British actress. This was taken from a beloved book by Walter Tevis, who also wrote The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Some of those who loved the book, which I haven’t read, have complained that Beth was very plain, which Taylor-Joy is not. Sometimes it’s better not to have read the book. For me, she managed to make herself look mousy, at least until she blossomed and gained confidence. I think almost anyone could enjoy this as much as we did.