HELLO MINI SERIES.

 

The Queen's Gambit - Taylor-Joy

While I was at the BBC, one of their Mandarins gave the explanation “Series are the same chaps doing different things; serials are the same chaps doing the same things and anthologies are different chaps doing different things.” If you follow his definition the newly dominant TV form isn’t mini series but serial. It isn’t even new. Hitchcock had Bob Stevens doing Alec Coppel’s “I Killed the Count” in three weekly 1957 episodes. (That one had already been a 1939 Ben Lyon Movie and a 1948 BBC play) I’m sure that earlier efforts could be found. These have been bubbling to the surface at regular intervals. Dan Curtis’ 1983 version of Herman Wouk’s Winds of War attracted attention as did Simon Wincer’s 1989 Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove or Josée Dayan’s 1998 Le Comte de Monte Cristo and 2000 Les Miserables. We’re up to four on Fargo. What is new is that an attempt to make streaming the dominant model of presentation has attracted a new level of talent and ambition. 

I’ve been watching this without great attention. Even the best ones had always tended to have a strong exposition followed by repetitive central sections and a rushed finale put together with an eye to a likely sequel. Think Paolo Sorrentino’s two handsome Pope series. Pieces by cinema celebrities like Martin Scorsese’s 2019 The Irishman or Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 Roma clearly played better in theaters and they take time that could accommodate several movies 

The Queen's Gambit - Taylor-Joy & Scott Frank

Netflix' The Queen’s Gambit was recommended to me and I wanted to watch Marielle Heller, the director of Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, in something. This one proved to be the most adept use of the format I’d seen. Show runner Scott Frank had a history as a movie writer which you could think of as solid rather than brilliant - Little Man Tate, Out of Sight, Wolverine. His break through appears to be the 2017 western Mini-Series Godless. He is credited with writing and directing all seven episodes of The Queen’s Gambit, drawing heavily on the original novel by Walter Tevis who also authored The Hustler. Stand-out in a gallery of superior performances is star Anya Taylor-Joy who takes over the central character from young Ilsa Johnson, as a teenager in the second episode. She got her experience being a scream queen in horror flix like Witch and Marrowbone. She’s so good in this one I should seek some of those out.  

 

The Queen’s Gambit has a lot going for it. It’s subject is meant to be chess and they put in a bit of effort on explaining the game with second billed institute janitor Bill Camp reluctantly teaching Johnson in the opening and sympa brothers Matthew and Russell Dennis Lewis briefing Taylor-Joy as she signs on for her first tournament at Henry Clay High School - Home of the Fighting Owls - and explaining to step mother Heller during the games she watches uncomprehending. One of the things that makes the piece superior is the way Heller however spots what is happening by seeing the audience reaction to the girl’s moves - her successes from intuition. This is the way the production works with the camera focused on the people rather than the contests. For the match with the Dutch champion we don’t even see the board. An understanding of the moves isn’t really an assist in watching the film. 

They do come up with some striking effects work - the motif of imagining the pieces on the ceiling, chessmen self animating on the board while the characters perform at normal speed and the screen as a checker board with characters and objects in the squares.

Taylor-Joy & Thomas Brodie-Sangster

The production’s achievement is that it fields a whole range of things that are as important and as involving as the chess. 

Most obviously is parenting, with the disaster of Johnson’s own incapable "trailer trash" mother landing her in the severe Methuen Children’s Home where religion cops the first of several serves in the film. While her friend Moses Ingram is left behind (“Too old, too black to be adopted”), Johnson is handed off to Heller, who is in a rocky marriage with Patrick Kennedy, shortly before he departs taking the family car, to leave their leafy suburb for Detroit. Their house, grotesquely over furnished with modern home items (“prints, copies not the real thing of course”) becomes another major element of the film. 

Marielle Heller & Taylor-Joy

It looks like Heller is going to screw up like Taylor-Joy’s previous mentors, sending her off to fetch the over the counter drugs that already have a grip on her and getting her school clothes from sale at Ben Snyder's, the local department store where the snobby school mate says she would never dream of shopping. This girl keeps on showing up, paralleling the lead’s life with her own conformity,

Heller’s character proves to be one of the piece’s strengths. A loser after she settled for less when stage fright ruined her chances of becoming a Pianist, she discovers that being a chess wiz is a way of getting ahead. (eating air plane diners while flying to a tournament has Taylor-Joy say “This may be the best Xmas I ever have”) Heller realises that her  way of living is no kind of role model and doesn’t try to assert herself. She’s not Mildred Pierce. Their brief negotiating a manager's fee is one of the film's nicest scenes. 

This is something new and a strong dynamic leaving us wondering how they are going to keep going without it. When we are settling in to the idea of the Kentucky home as a cage to escape, we get the Harry Melling sub plot contrasting with the cosmopolitan existence of fellow prodigy Thomas Brodie-Sangster (in a cowboy hat to point his participation in Godless), who was a celebrity at nine while Johnson was playing the institute janitor, along with Bodie-Sangster’s fashion model friend Millie Brady. The neighborhood druggist, treated as a simpleton, proves to have a shrewd notion of events. This is not a piece that lets you settle into comfortable expectations. 

It offers the multiplex big budget strategy of shooting in a variety of real and simulated locations - Kentucky, New York, Mexico City, Paris and Moscow which the characters discover as most of their audience will be doing. Uli Hanish's design is particularly strong - the conversion of the house, the imposing Russian interiors. 

 

We see Taylor-Joy’s Russian lessons setting up the elevator ride in the luxury Aztec Hotel and, when we think we understand the format, there’s that knife that Brodie-Sangster carries but  never comes into play - unless it is part of that material with Taylor-Joy as a blonde that hasn’t made it into the final edit. Keeping the Newman score for The Robe running under the break-in is effective but they do it again with the singalong. Did we really need the inset of the old man laying out pieces for the game in the Moscow winter street? 

Taylor-Joy, Heller and fifties decor

 

A major part of the package is locating it in the fifties and sixties (JFK magazine covers, big cars, pop music on black & white TV), shown as alarmingly ugly with tensions with the Russians for whom Chess superiority is part of the national honor. Brodie-Sangster fumes at playing with plastic pieces in high school halls while sports draw crowds of thousands and the Russians nurture their champions. “They pay people to play chess!” We learn that Taylor-Joy’s Christian organisation funding depends on her making a dim wit statement about the infamy of communism and the State Department sends along minder John Schwab who offers her the contents of his flask to top up her orange juice before telling her to lay off alcohol (“You just offered me a drink” “It was a test”), a nice contrast to the scene with Heller and the second beer.

This comes after we hear Russian master Marcin Dorocinski is planning on working on the girl’s character flaws and learn that the Russian female masters are never allowed to play against men. It all builds our anticipation of the inescapable Moscow championship game with Dorocinski and they even manage to work suspense and surprise into that. The final image with her coat the one white element in the desaturated frame is great. 

It’s not that elements of this one are predictable but that they field familiar situations and concepts in a way that we are not used to, managing to keep the viewers off balance without alienating them. It’s a show of considerable skill. 

Never since the nineteen tens has there been such uncertainty about not just the length but also the structure and pacing of movie entertainment. It will be interesting to see what kind of a reception Queen’s Gambit gets and whether it has an influence on the form in which it has been presented. 

 And before we leave this one, an observation. The film is all I know about the chess fanatics, complete with the unkind scene of Taylor Johnson telling the nerdy kid with glasses that he’s stereotypical. It keeps on referencing children whose lives chess has absorbed, getting the bug age nine, excluding other elements, social unease, impatience with conformist values. I couldn’t help making a comparison with movie freaks. It’s not a little disturbing in the same way that Cinema Paradiso is, under it’s much admired charm.

Taylor-Joy and Brodie-Thomas

 

 

 

 Barrie Pattison 2021