Chess's Wise Child

By RICHARD CORLISS

A child's games are sugar-coated lessons in socializing. You learn to help the kid next to you, join the group sprint toward adolescence, be a part of the machinery of community -- as if life were mainly about teamwork. A chess child learns different lessons: that life is war by other means and that you must fight it alone, with all your wiles and no compassion.

Then again, it could be just a game -- a wonderfully complex game that absorbs a child without consuming him. "You can be competitive in chess," says teacher Bruce Pandolfini, "and still be a healthy, normal person. You can just be yourself."

Joshua Waitzkin won many trophies in his early years as a New York City chess prodigy, but he was always, and mainly, a kid. He loved baseball, basketball, reading, horsing around -- normal boy stuff. He also sat up nights pondering the 64 squares. He watched gaunt gladiators play speed chess for drug money in Washington Square Park in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. He studied with Pandolfini and played tournaments under the loving, sometimes jealous, eye of his journalist father Fred. By his eighth birthday, Josh was the top-ranked player of his age. Today, at 16, he still is. And the 1984 book Fred wrote about Josh is now a motion picture. Both have the title Searching for Bobby Fischer, but they could be called Finding a Wise Child -- or A Prince Among Pawns.

Josh, who will attend the Professional Children's School this fall after eight years at the Dalton School, is still a kid. "I am kind of two different people," he says. "Very serious and competitive in one world. And Josh in the other one." The film ensures that he is now a third person in a new world: the semifictional, wholly romantic hero of a movie docudrama. He is other people's idea of Josh: a child again, as imagined by writer-director Steve Zaillian and played, with a nice, otherworldly seriousness, by chess whiz Max Pomeranc, 8. Yet for Josh's mother, who learned chess from her small son and now teaches it at two schools, the dislocation is familiar. "As a work of art," says Bonnie Waitzkin, "this story has been our reality for nine years. Fred wrote it, I edited it, Josh lived it. The movie is just another unfolding."

By turns mawkish and affecting, the film might be called Rocky, 8. The boxing match is a chess match, the plucky challenger is 3 1/2 ft. tall, and his ultimate opponent is an Apollo Creed kid with killer moves and no-soul eyes. Zaillian, whose early screenplays (The Falcon and the Snowman, Awakenings) turned real-life psychodrama into italicized melodrama, underlines the emotions here too, as if the subject weren't strong enough to hold the interest of a Nintendo child or a Home Alone parent.

The picture often has the flashy moves of a chess patzer. Phone books are smashed and chessmen trashed. Josh plays catch in a sepulchral chess club, inhabited by a veritable cuckoo's nest of chess nuts. The movie also distorts the chess education of this bantam Rocky. It has Josh learning almost equally from Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley) and a kindly street hustler (Laurence Fishburne). In fact, Pandolfini was the boy's main teacher. Kingsley does have a charismatic gravity and the carriage of -- Fred Waitzkin's phrase -- "a ruined aristocrat." In portraying a teacher whom Josh refers to as "a great friend, a wonderful man," Kingsley also has a touch of the bullying pedant in him, a dab of Wackford Squeers. "I was just never that mean," says Pandolfini, a famous soft touch. "I hope not, anyhow."

For love and money -- unlike their European counterparts, American chess players rarely make a living from the game -- Pandolfini agreed to be an adviser on the film. He showed actors how to grab the chess pieces ("There is a certain elegance to it," he says) and devised some 200 chess positions. For him, "The film isn't so much about trying to find the next Bobby Fischer; it is about trying to find those good times that came upon Fischer's success in 1972, when chess was suddenly important to the American public."

The film may indeed rekindle that fervor. In its gaudy way, it could also remind audiences of important issues rarely addressed in movies: the estrangement of genius ("He is better at this," says Joe Mantegna as Fred, "than I've ever been at anything in my life"), the sick thrill of competition (a lesser player stares at Josh with craven awe) and the romance of failure. "Maybe it's better not to be the best," Josh says as the competition heats up; "then you can lose and it's O.K."The movie's subject is unusual, but its themes are universal: a child's discovery of what makes him special and a parent's loving possessiveness.

First Fred Waitzkin had to accustom himself to his son's brilliance. Now he must prepare for cinematic notoriety. "I hope there isn't upheaval," he says. "I like our lives." And Josh? He likes his life a lot these days, and being a movie star once removed isn't the reason. "I never understood the beauty of chess," he says. "But about two years ago, I discovered the artistic, creative side of chess, and that has given me added inspiration. I tell you, I never had such enthusiasm as I do now." Let's hope this wise child never grows up.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York