In 1884, the American star chess player Paul Morphy was found dead in his bathtub, at the age of forty-seven. “The pride and the sorrow of chess is gone forever,” the Austrian chess master Wilhelm Steinitz wrote in an elegy, the following year. Morphy had begun winning citywide tournaments in his native New Orleans at the age of nine. By the time he was twenty, he was the United States champion, and by the time he was twenty-one, many considered him to be the best player on earth. In 1858, Morphy held a notorious “blindfold” exhibition, in Paris, at the Café de la Régence: he sat in one room while eight opponents sat in another and called out his moves without looking at a single board. He played for ten hours straight, without stopping to eat, and ended the night with six wins and two draws. But Morphy grew bored; he was so gifted at chess that he began to consider it a child’s game. He walked away from competition and opened a law office, but the business quickly failed. He spent his final two decades living as a vagabond on family money, growing increasingly paranoid and haunted by his former fame.
The parable of Paul Morphy and his squandered genius pops up halfway through the fifth episode of “The Queen’s Gambit,” Scott Frank and Allan Scott’s handsome, dexterous new Netflix miniseries, based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, about a female chess prodigy from Lexington, Kentucky, and her pursuit of a world title in the late nineteen-sixties. The prodigy in question, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), is speaking to her friend and sometimes lover Harry Beltik (Harry Melling), a local chess champion with capped teeth and a nebbishy demeanor. Harry, who has been living with Beth to help her train for an upcoming match against the dominant Russian champion, Borgov, in Paris, announces that he will be moving out. He realizes that he has taught Beth all he knows, and that, in turn, she has taught him that his own talent for the game will never compare to hers. As he leaves, he hands her a tattered copy of the book “Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess,” by William Ewart Napier. “You think that’s gonna be me?” Beth sneers, with a diffident jutting of her chin. “I think that is you,” Harry replies.
In Beth’s case, the sorrow that threatens to undercut her pride is not boredom with the game. She loves the game, and has since, as a young orphan, she began sneaking away from classes at the Methuen Home For Girls to play chess in the basement with the gruff janitor, Mr. Shaibel. Chess, for her, is a refuge; her trouble is everything else. When Beth was nine years old, her birth mother killed herself by crashing a car, with Beth still in it. As a teen-ager, Beth is adopted by an unhappy couple, the Wheatleys, who divorce soon after she moves in. Alma Wheatley (played, in a quietly devastating performance, by the film director and sometimes actor Marielle Heller, with a period-accurate, stilted manner of speaking that includes phrases like “my tranquility needs to be refurbished”) is a familiar type, the depressive midcentury housewife, chipper at the department store but a mess at home. She and Beth have an addiction in common: inhaling fistfuls of green tranquilizer pills in order to maintain a façade of equilibrium. Beth was first given the medication at Methuen, where she would take it at night and hallucinate chess games on the ceiling, the pieces dancing above her head like tipsy débutantes.
This premise might suggest that “The Queen’s Gambit” will be a predictable variation on the trope of the damaged genius, the poor brilliant maverick who is held back only by buried trauma. Yet the show, which begins with Beth as a child (played with a placid scowl by Isla Johnston) and then jumps forward to follow her through her teen years and early adulthood, proceeds less like a dark psychological drama or a gritty underdog sporting tale and more like the origin story of a wizard, or a superheroine. Beth is assiduous, serious, well-read, almost nunlike in her studies of strategies such as the Ruy Lopez and the Sicilian Defense (as a teen-ager, she’s so desperate to read chess magazines that she shoplifts them from the local pharmacy). We see her decimate her opponents, easily winning tournaments against men twice her age. She learns to speak Russian in anticipation of facing the Soviets one day. She plays through games by herself for hours—in her head, on the edge of the bathtub, on the kitchen counter. She rarely wavers in her confidence, and can often come across as arrogant, or at least disarmingly unflappable. When Alma discovers that Beth’s talent could be a ticket to a better life for them both—prize money, international travel, fame—Beth doesn’t resent the fact that she is soon supporting her adoptive mother (and her fondness for Gibson cocktails) but, instead, embraces their arrangement as business partners. Alma doesn’t really understand chess, but she has other skills to teach—through her, Beth is introduced to cosmetics, classical music, and her first beer, and gains a companion who is kind, if not quite maternal.
What makes “The Queen’s Gambit” so satisfying comes in large measure from the character Taylor-Joy brings to screen: a charming, elegant weirdo who delivers her lines with a cool, wintergreen snap, and never really reacts the way one might expect. Taylor-Joy, whose breakout role was in the 2015 horror film “The Witch,” starred in Autumn de Wilde’s eminently lovable new adaptation of “Emma,” and she will step into the role of Furiosa in the anticipated “Mad Max” prequel that starts filming next year. But “The Queen’s Gambit” is her star-making performance, a showcase for her particular oddball brand of elegance. Nearly every review of the series has mentioned Taylor-Joy’s eyes, which are the size of silver dollars and set far apart, giving her the appearance of a beautiful hammerhead shark. But what she brings to “The Queen’s Gambit” is a peculiar poise, a capricious hauteur that is willowy but never weak. Taylor-Joy’s background is in classical ballet, and as Beth she brings a subtle physicality to the game of chess. The chess masters Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini, who consulted on the show, taught Taylor-Joy how professionals move the pieces along the board, but, as she told the magazine Chess Life, she developed her own way of gliding her hands across the board. When she captures a piece, she floats her long fingers above it and then gently flicks it into her palm, like she is fishing a shiny stone out of a river. When she begins a game, she rests her chin on her delicate folded hands, like a female mantis preparing to feast, staring at her opponent with such unblinking intensity that at least once I had to glance away from the screen.
There has been some grumbling that Taylor-Joy’s twiggy beauty—as svelte, white, and doll-like as it is—undercuts the story “The Queen’s Gambit” tells; is it not enough for a woman to beat the boys without her having to look like a Richard Avedon editorial? But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. “The Queen’s Gambit,” instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style. Beth develops a prim, gamine flair for fashion with the same studied meticulousness that she brings to the chessboard, and in the course of the show her look evolves apace with her game. She spends her first chess winnings on a new plaid dress; she grows out her blunt baby bangs and adopts a more feminine, Rita Hayworth-esque waved bob. Her covetable wardrobe, of mod minidresses and boxy crepe blouses in creamy shades of mint green and eggshell, makes her a press darling, who gets asked about her look at chess junkets. Her clothing, along with the show’s dazzling interiors (not only the Wheatleys’ home, a sumptuous parade of sherbet-colored wallpaper, but the many swanky hotel suites that Alma and Beth stay in on the road), calls to mind the aesthetic enchantments of “Mad Men,” the nineteen-sixties period piece against which every other nineteen-sixties period piece will forever be measured (and the fervor around “The Queen’s Gambit” ’s costume design has similarly hijacked the zeitgeist, inspiring close readings in Vogue and a zazzy virtual exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum). In turn, the game of chess, in “The Queen’s Gambit,” sheds its schlubbiness and reveals a bewitching (and, it must be said, sometimes erotic) elegance. When a reporter from LIFE presses Beth for a juicy quote on what it’s like to be a girl competing among men, Beth demurs. “Chess isn’t always competitive,” she says. “Chess can also be beautiful.”
Without ever mentioning him by name, “The Queen’s Gambit” cleverly inverts the myth of Bobby Fischer, the famously angsty male American chess champion who was playing around the same time as Beth. Fischer was seen as the great hope of American chess during the Cold War, but he was also often erratic, antisocial, and prone to long disappearances and angry rants about the game. “The Queen’s Gambit” begins with the conventional notion of chess as a lonely sport, and with Beth among the eccentric outsiders who tend to be drawn to it. But as the story unfolds, and Beth comes of age during the sixties, experimenting with marijuana, casual sex, and unrequited crushes on fellow-players, “Queen’s Gambit” gradually discards the idea that chess dominance requires monastic isolation or a resentment of the wider world. (The Soviets are the best chess players, Beth’s on-again, off-again lover, the swaggering Benny, played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, tells her at one point, “because they play together as a team . . . Us Americans, we work alone because we’re all such individualists.”) For viewers who are less sentimental than I am, the ending of the show—in which several of Beth’s male chess buddies, including Harry, Benny, and a pair of plucky twins from the Kentucky chess circuit, place a long-distance group call to Russia to offer advice on how she can finally beat her rival—might seem too predictable, or sweet. And it is true that there is a tinge of Mary Sue fantasy to Beth, as her boys show up for her like a bevy of tuxedoed dancers escorting Liza Minnelli from the stage. But I found it moving to see Beth, who has spent so many hours and evening studying the chess moves of dead men in books, discover that she has support among the living.
