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How The Queen’s Gambit Compares to the Book It’s Based On

Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit is on the New York Times best-seller list, thanks to what Netflix calls its “biggest limited scripted series ever.” But what will fans of the blockbuster show find when they crack open the book that inspired it over Thanksgiving weekend?

Many of the lines of dialogue familiar to viewers are straight out of Tevis’ story, and the general plot—chess prodigy overcomes addiction to rise to the top of her field—remains the same. But along with skipping those loooooong passages describing chess moves, writer and director Scott Frank makes a few changes to Tevis’ novel.

Below, we’ve rounded up the most significant differences. Needless to say, spoilers follow.

The Battle of the Sexes

Aaron Bady argued recently in the Los Angeles Review of Books that one of biggest pleasures of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit is that things keep almost going wrong and then being fine . One contributor to the comfortable feeling the show provokes is the way that the sexism of the chess world never quite seems to affect Beth: She gets a “surrogate family and community” out of her chess career, even though the male-dominated world of Cold War-era chess seems like an improbable place for a teenage girl to thrive.

The novel’s gender dynamics are not so pleasant. When young Beth is about to play the high school boys at their chess club, they stare at her, and she feels their animosity and responds by feeling “a hatred as black as night” rising. At her first tournament, she beats one boy who is so angry about it that he swears at her and doesn’t shake her hand. At that tournament, even Harry Beltik—played on the show by Harry Melling as first smug, and ultimately soft and weepy—is hostile to her in the book. After they find out they’ll be playing each other the next day, he says to her as she’s leaving: “Tomorrow.” Later on, she thinks, “When he stepped toward her as she was leaving, some part of her had thought he would hit her.”

And when Harry comes to her house and trains her, only to have her pass him by, he doesn’t take it with wounded sadness, as the Beltik of the show does. He’s furious. During the game when they realize she’s far beyond him, he “glares” at her, and she can feel his anger. He stops coming to her bed that night. On the show, he leaves her while begging her to stop drinking; in the book, he leaves after a conversation memorable mostly for its brevity, and the implication is that he can’t handle playing second fiddle. And when she talks to Benny Watts on the phone from Russia, to get advice about her final match with Borgov, it’s only Benny on the other end—no magical reappearance for Harry.

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Beth’s Addiction

On the show, Beth goes out with a friend and gets drunk the night before her second match with Borgov in Paris. She wakes up late and loses the match because of this lapse in judgment. In the book, she takes three pills the night before that match, but wakes up “refreshed,” feeling “confident, smart, and ready.” She plays well (“her best chess,” she thinks), but Borgov beats her anyway. In the aftermath of that match, on the show, Beth decides not to return to New York and reunite with Benny, and the choice between “drinking” and “Benny” is something Benny articulates outright. In the book, Benny has little reaction to her decision, beyond sounding “irritated” and warning her not to quit chess out of discouragement; the bender comes later. (More on Benny in a bit.)

Extraordinary Coincidences

The bender that ruins Beth’s match with Borgov is just one example of the way the show takes the subtler twists and turns of the book’s plot and dials them up a few notches, leaning on Beth’s addiction as a driving force. The show also relies heavily on coincidence in a way the book does not. Consider the way Beth unites with her old friend Jolene in the story’s last act, as Beth gets sober to train for her trip to Russia. In the show, Jolene shows up randomly at Beth’s front door, right when she’s needed. In the book, Beth realizes she needs help to get her head right and has an epiphany that it’s Jolene who could help her do it. She calls the orphanage to track her friend down.

Same goes for the handsome player D.L. Townes, who shows up again toward the end of the show, sent to Moscow to photograph Beth for a newspaper. In the book, he appears at her first tournament and becomes an early lust object for the young player, but after she sees him at another tournament when she’s about 17, there’s no third encounter; Townes just never reappears again.

The most striking change the show makes to the characterization of Beth’s friend Jolene has to do with the girls’ time in the orphanage together. In Tevis’ novel, when Jolene is 13 and Beth is nine, Jolene comes to Beth’s bed in the middle of the night and tries to get Beth to engage in mutual masturbation. When Beth, “terrified” by the situation, says no, Jolene goes away, but she’s angry about it. For a while, the two are enemies; when Jolene calls Beth “cracker” in the hallway, she means it not as a term of endearment, but a curse. Beth, for her part, responds by hissing the n-word. A Black orphan who tries to seduce her younger friend? A white heroine who uses the n-word as a weapon? None of this is in the show, surely too fraught for the escapist fantasy Netflix has created.

In the book, Beth thinks about Jolene periodically, while in the show, she’s absent from the middle of the story. Jolene appears when Beth visualizes what she wants to become: “a truly professional woman and the finest chess player in the world, traveling confidently by herself in the first-class cabins of airplanes, tall, perfectly dressed, good-looking and poised—a kind of white Jolene.” She often thinks she might send Jolene a note, but doesn’t.

In the book, Jolene gets a scholarship in physical education to attend university, and when she reunites with her old friend, she helps Beth get through her withdrawal from alcohol and pills by training her in the university gym, putting her through her paces in weightlifting, calisthenics, and—as seen in the show—handball. But she doesn’t give Beth money to go to Russia, and the show’s conversation about her not being a “guardian angel” never happens. In fact, though the book’s Jolene has helped Beth get her head straight, when Beth tries to call her from the airport on the way to Russia, she’s not home.

Benny Watts

Benny, the show’s string-bean trickster , seems to be a composite of a few players from Tevis’ book. In the novel, Beth sees an older chess player at one point at a tournament, holding court in a hotel lobby just as Benny does in the show. This man—who is not Benny—is wearing a black knit cap with a knife at his waist; he’s a “pirate” who looks like “someone out of Treasure Island.” He leaves an intense impression on Beth, because of his authoritative approach to chess. When she finally meets the real Benny, Beth reflects that he looks “as American as Huckleberry Finn,” though “cheerful and sly,” in an untrustworthy way. He’s got “flat straw-colored hair,” and later he grows it down to his shoulders. He’s “pale and thin and very calm.”

On the show, Beth’s relationship with Benny is the most romantic one she has, but in the novel, Beth doesn’t sigh and say “So that’s what that’s supposed to be like!” after having sex with Benny. “Making love had been all right,” she thinks, “though not as exciting as she had hoped.” There’s a distance to Benny, and she gets furious when he goes to play a poker game the day after they have sex, and she realizes he probably planned it out that way. “His behavior was like his chess game: smooth and easy on the surface but tricky and infuriating beneath,” she thinks to herself. “The cool son of a bitch. It was quick sex with her, and then off to the boys. He had probably planned it that way for a week. Tactics and strategy. She could have killed him.”

But all is not lost for Benny-Beth shippers turning to the Tevis book for a fix. Flying to Russia alone, Beth wishes Benny were there:

She missed Benny’s quick and sober mind, his judgment and tenacity, his knowledge of chess and his knowledge of her. He would be in the seat beside her, and they could talk chess, and in Moscow after her games they would analyze the play and then plan for the next opponent. They would eat their meals together in the hotel, the way she had done with Mrs. Wheatley. They could see Moscow, and whenever they wanted to they could make love at their hotel.

The novel leaves the door open for Benny and Beth to come together again, after she beats Borgov and flies home, as triumphant on the page as she is onscreen.

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The Fatal Flaw of “The Queen’s Gambit”

By Sarah Miller

Anya TaylorJoy sitting in front of a chess board looking away

I picked up Walter Tevis’s novel “ The Queen’s Gambit ,” from 1983, at Skylight Books, in Los Angeles, sometime around 2002. It was a staff pick, and the blurb on the blue index card taped underneath said something like “sleeper gem by dude who wrote ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth,’ about an orphaned chess prodigy addicted to downers—read this now.” On the cover, Michael Ondaatje, the author of “The English Patient,” said that he reread it “every few years—for the pure pleasure and skill of it.” I read it in two days, and over the years I have reread it probably a dozen times. From its first sentence (“Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard”) to its last, it was my platonic ideal of a novel. I loved its respect for the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (“From the back row Beth put up her hand. It was the first time she had done this”) and how this general efficiency made its richer emotional and physical details stand out, like brightly wrapped Christmas gifts set under a sparse tree. “Do I have to care about chess?” people would ask when I recommended the novel. I promised them that anyone who has ever felt lost, rejected, or underestimated while nurturing a fierce, mute hope that something residing deep within them might somehow save their life would love this book.

Following its début in October, “The Queen’s Gambit,” according to Netflix , became the streaming platform’s No. 1 show in sixty-three countries and its most-watched “limited scripted series” ever. (The show also appears to be responsible for compounding an ongoing, pandemic-induced chess boom , as measured in online chess activity as well as sales of chess sets and accessories.) I began watching the day it came out. I felt a twinge of familiarity in the austere rows of metal beds in the Methuen Home—the orphanage where Beth lives after her mother’s sudden death—and in the matchy-matchy décor at the home of her adoptive mother, Mrs. Wheatley, in suburban Lexington. But I could not summon any similar spark of recognition for Beth herself. As Beth’s chess career took off, I was interested in where it took her—drab gymnasiums, then grand Midwest hotels, then grander international hotels—but I did not care much what happened when she got there. At the same time I was being given the gift of seeing this imagined world come sumptuously to life, it was also being taken away, and the reason for the sense of loss was obvious: Anya Taylor-Joy is way too good-looking to play Beth Harmon.

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

A complaint such as this one, about the beautiful performers who take the place of our ordinary book characters, is common, even tedious. The Web site TV Tropes has an entry devoted to Adaptational Attractiveness, wherein “someone who was originally fat, plain, or even downright ugly is played by a much more conventionally attractive actor.” (One writer has helpfully mapped adaptational attractiveness onto a spectrum known as the Fassbender Scale .) Hulu’s adaptation of Sally Rooney ’s novel “ Normal People ” confused some fans who thought that Marianne, a bullied outcast in the book, was perhaps not most effectively played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who probably spends her free time modelling. I agreed with this criticism a hundred per cent, but I also sobbed through the whole series, every second of Marianne’s pain piercing my heart like a dagger carved from the finest ebony, polished to match the shine of Edgar-Jones’s eyes and hair. I guess I’ve had enough really hot friends to believe that their relationships are just as tragic and confusing as anyone else’s.

Actors Are Too Hot Hill is a silly place to die, yet the acclaim for “The Queen’s Gambit” series, which stars an actual former model , has stranded me there, unable to descend until I have said my piece. Allow me to shout from my lone perch at its summit that Beth Harmon is not pretty, and there is no story about her that can be told if she is.

We know that Beth is unattractive because it is written down. It is one of the first things we find out about her, right after she arrives at Methuen. “You are the ugliest white girl ever . Your nose is ugly and your face is ugly and your skin is like sandpaper. You white trash cracker bitch,” her bully and future friend Jolene declares. Beth does not respond, “knowing that it was true.” Beth spends her girlhood in this lonely place, her only happiness learning chess in the basement and, when she can’t, playing chess games in her mind. When she can’t sleep or concentrate, she lies awake, tense, her stomach contracted, tasting “vinegar in her mouth.” Her homeliness seems, for a while, like destiny: she watches pretty girls get adopted out of Methuen as she remains there to grow up. At twelve, she finally finds a home with Mrs. Wheatley, who is both an arguably bad parent and just what independent, chilly Beth needs. She takes the shame of feeling plain into her new life, however: “Sometimes when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls’ room between classes, her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth.”

Tevis mentions Beth’s ugliness too often for readers to imagine that it is just some routine, awkward part of childhood that slips away with puberty, like a boy’s squeaky tones settling gradually into a mannish timbre, or because some nice girlfriend—she has none, after Jolene—takes her to Sephora. Instead, Beth becomes reasonably attractive by learning to play chess and then excelling at it. The first moment that Beth is able to regard her reflection without disgust comes right after she wins her third tournament game. Some forty pages later, a chess player turned journalist named Townes tells Beth, “You’ve even gotten good-looking.” Toward the end of the book, Jolene herself, seeing Beth in magazines, declares, “You’ve lost your ugly.”

I’m not gathering these pieces of evidence to suggest that “The Queen’s Gambit” is a book about looks—it’s not like in “Clueless” when Alicia Silverstone yelps, “Project!” and we soon see dorky Brittany Murphy sporting a choker, hitting on guys. Here is the book’s most explicit mention of Beth’s physical confidence as an adult: “Beth was wearing a dark-green dress with white piping at the throat and sleeves. She had slept soundly the night before. She was ready for him.” Chess helps her to inhabit her body comfortably, and this allows her to play better chess. It’s the playing-better-chess part of the deal that really matters to her.

Beth’s transformation—not into a swan, exactly, but a better-looking duckling—doesn’t need to be mimicked exactly for the adaptation to work. The problem has to do with the fundamentals of storytelling, in the tradition of Syd Field or Joseph Campbell or “ Save the Cat! ”—the character has to want something. Book Beth’s want is as thick as the cheap wool sweaters she wears as a child while yearning for cashmere, as thick as the “cold, pale butter” she spreads on restaurant rolls and eats as an adopted teen, after a childhood of thin, institutional French dressing. Her addiction is a great, yawning want, at first for the warmth and safety that those green downers give her and, as an adult, for the freedom sobriety will give her if she can manage to ditch them. Of course, her greatest want, the one that thrums on almost every page, is to play chess—and then to be the best at chess. Early on, having been told that she is “phenomenal” at the game, she looks up the word. “The dictionary said: ‘extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.’ She repeated these words silently to herself now, ‘extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.’ They became a tune in her mind.”

When this tune starts playing in Beth’s mind, she is still at the orphanage; the tune is aspirational. Anya Taylor-Joy, however, is singing this tune from the moment we meet her—not as a secret wish that chess can save her from poverty, ugliness, and obscurity, but as a boast. Even as an orphan, in her sweet white nightgown, elbow-checking Jolene, smiling with sexy snideness, there’s no question that Netflix Beth will land on her feet. She walks into every room like she owns it. One signature move is tucking her chin into her chest, looking up at people with widened eyes—a disdainful miming of submission.

The scene in Tevis’s novel in which Beth goes to her first chess championship, having no idea how to conduct herself or what is expected of her, is re-created almost line for line in the series. “Do you have a clock?” the boy checking in players asks, and Beth says no. He asks, “What’s your rating?” and Beth replies, “I don’t have a rating.” Tevis’s book is uninflected in some ways, inviting the reader’s projections, but we have enough information to make some good guesses as to how unpretty, anxious Beth might deliver these lines. Taylor-Joy’s tone, though, is one of impatient self-regard, in this moment and most others. She doesn’t need chess to survive. She’s a confident girl who finds everyone annoying and wears great clothes and flies off to beautiful places to be weird around guys. If she didn’t play chess and weren’t such a bitch, it would be “Emily in Paris.”

The series actually begins in Paris, with Beth waking up drunk in a hotel room. If you novelized the series, rather than the other way around, it would begin something like this: “On awakening, Beth Harmon crawled out of a hundred-and-ten-gallon porcelain bathtub and, wet clothes clinging to her perfect form, slipped instantly on the Italian tile floor.” I might have kept reading, but I would have waited in vain for any indication that Beth needed someone to bear witness to her triumph. Drama happens, she wins, she loses, she takes pills, she stops taking them, she sleeps with this guy and then that one, someone dies—but there are no stakes. Watching the show, I kept thinking, This might be an interesting, dicey, and potentially moving situation for an orphaned drug addict obsessed with chess—and then Taylor-Joy would pout a little or balance her face seductively on her hands, or employ those enormous eyes as lizards employ neck frills. There’s not a single moment when I thought, Please let this work out; please let this go well; please let Beth thrive.

I don’t mean to suggest that Taylor-Joy is a bad actress. But she exudes mattering . The core of “The Queen’s Gambit”—a young woman struggling to matter at all becomes a great chess player—might be impossible for her to play. The series copies virtually everything from the book aside from its central tension. At the end, Beth sits down in a Moscow park across from an old Russian man and a chessboard. Instead of Tevis’s line, “Would you like to play chess?,” Beth issues a command: “Let’s play.” Why ask when you already know the answer?

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“The Queen’s Gambit” Is the Most Satisfying Show on Television

By Rachel Syme

By Ethan Kuperberg

The Queen’s Gambit offers a winning combo of escapism and period drama

Anya Taylor-Joy stars in The Queen’s Gambit

The grueling world of competitive chess isn’t the most obvious setting for an escapist tale, but The Queen’s Gambit is a frequently transportive series, filled with lavish set pieces, gorgeous costuming, and all the 1960s pop needle drops Netflix money can buy. Its more straightforward pleasures are offset by producer/writer/director Scott Frank’s meditative—and just as meticulously detailed—approach to period drama. Bridging those two worlds is a masterful performance by Anya Taylor-Joy, who leads the cast as Beth Harmon, a chess prodigy driven as much by her innate talent as her trauma.

The Queen's Gambit plays familiar moves with style and star power: Review

Anya Taylor-Joy is stunning as a self-destructive chess prodigy in Netflix's solidly entertaining miniseries.

I like chess, I like '60s fashion, and I like Anya Taylor-Joy . So I was a cheap date for The Queen's Gambit , Netflix's new seven-part miniseries streaming Friday. Taylor-Joy plays Beth Harmon, an outcast teen chess prodigy who becomes a grown-up celebrity chess casualty. Writer-director Scott Frank tracks her from a dingy orphanage cellar to globetrotting duels against Soviet supermen. It's a stylish period piece with the rambling-years momentum of a John Irving novel. Luscious production design and a darkly fascinating lead performance duel against mawkish sentiment and a messy final act. It's always fun to watch, even when it's playing emotional checkers.

The series begins with Beth hungover and half-sunk into a bathtub. She's in a palatial Paris hotel room; the place looks trashed. She gets dressed, notices someone in her bed, pops some pills, and races downstairs. Flashbulbs pop in her face. The whole world press is there, watching her play the Russian grandmaster Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski). They make a sharp contrast. He's a stern middle-aged communist, somehow looming and invisible, followed everywhere by his KGB retinue of bodyguard-jailers. She's glamorous, undone, afire, and lonely. It's a great opening, rife with conflict: America, Russia, woman, man, youth, experience, druggy hedonism, rigid professionalism.

Alas, it is a prologue flash-forward, the hottest story idea of 2006. Queen's Gambit kind of earns its backstep. The first episode circles to a younger Beth (Isla Johnston), shellshocked after her mother dies in a maybe suicidal car crash. She arrives at a midcentury Catholic orphanage. Those three words suggest nightmare possibilities, but here the abuse is all chemical. Orderlies stuff the kids full of state-mandated tranquilizers. Beth is getting high on Orphan's Little Helper right as she discovers chess. Downstairs, somber janitor Mr. Shaibel ( Bill Camp ) plays solo matches on his ratty board. He starts teaching Beth the basics, and realizes he's found a queen.

Every episode takes another step forward in Beth's chess career, her coming of age, and her addiction spiral. It's a familiar biopic trajectory, though the source material is a novel by Walter Tevis. Taylor-Joy is at her best playing Beth as a kid with a Vulcan-ish awkward confidence. She lets you see how the chessboard is an escape for a confused young person and a kind of religion, offering "an entire world of just 64 squares" to someone whose inner life is full of murky confusion.

Beth winds up adopted by the Wheatleys, a married couple whose heavily patterned house looks like the mausoleum of '50s America. Dad Allston (Patrick Kennedy) is distantly busy. His wife, Alma ( Marielle Heller ), grieves a never-quite-explained loss by retreating into daylight drinking and perpetual television. When she realizes her adopted daughter has a lucrative chess habit, she sparks to life. Heller's performance is astounding, a world-weary match for Taylor-Joy's anxious curiosity. Alma becomes a supportive manager, yet there's something overly vicarious in her interest. She's being a good mother — and turning a teenager into her drinking buddy.

Everyone knows how to play chess, right? We've all seen The Wire ? Frank has a lot of director-y fun staging Beth's duels. There are split-screens, fourth-wall staring contests, time-lapse montages of pieces moving. Taylor-Joy's hands move so fast, I kept rewinding to figure out if the video was sped up. (I think it's just gusto.) I enjoyed the wonkish specificity of Beth's strategic evolution from blitzkrieg attack to patient lateral defense. You sense that Frank is unsure just how much strategy the audience will take, and he makes some dramatic sports-movie leaps. The important games are always a spiritual dual, elaborate flirtation, and/or a private reckoning with flashback sorrow.

What works better is how the miniseries brings the whole chess subculture to life. It's an environment of cerebral swagger, diffident competitiveness, and geek love. Beth starts off playing smartly dressed young weirdoes in cafeterias, where everyone whispers longingly about a Kentucky champion named Harry Beltik (Harry Melling). Rising the ranks, she meets national contender Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a beatnik cowboy who carries an ornamental knife. Brodie-Sangster has a lot of fun as the coolest kid in nerd club, brandishing his very own Sports Illustrated cover story and yearning for the USSR's enlightened chess culture. There are lushly art-directed arenas in Las Vegas and Mexico City, and Beth's interactions with her fellow players to take a few diagonal soap opera turns.

In Split and The Witch , Taylor-Joy's wide eyes exuded a paranoid gothic quality; she looked like what would happen if Emma Stone saw dead people. Her recent work has edged into droll comedy. All that and more comes into play here. Beth's an intellectual superhuman and an internal wreck, struggling with memories of her brilliant yet unsettled biological mother even as she nonchalantly dispatches egomaniacs. Queen's Gambit occasionally tries to expand into a larger tale of femininity, so many woman carrying hidden bags of clinking liquor bottles. The storytelling can turn a bit prosaic, though, and there's a point where all the dialogue is some kind of we-get-it warning about the dangers of obsessive greatness. Taylor-Joy adeptly plays high-functioning addiction, and I wish, I wish, I wish that her drug trips didn't involve giant chess pieces hanging down from the ceiling. Bad, digital effects, bad!

Frank's screenplays extend back a generation, from splendid '90s crime ( Get Shorty , Out of Sight ) through essential blockbusters ( Minority Report , Logan ). Netflix snared him for 2017's Emmy-winning Godless , and now the streaming service is basically employing him as a miniseries auteurist-in-residence. I heartily recommend this show, even if the last couple hours feature overt clichés and ever-blander dialogue. Queen's Gambit will be remembered as the final star-making moment for Taylor-Joy, before her movie career rockets fast and Furiosa -ly . The story is literally about an ingenue rising to global fame. But Taylor-Joy excels in the quiet moments, her eyelids narrowing as she decimates an opponent, her whole body physicalizing angry desperation when the game turns against her. The king might be in trouble. Fortunately, the queen has all the best moves. B

Review: The Queen’s Gambit

November 24, 2020

You’ve heard about the fashion and the drama – but does The Queen’s Gambit truly deliver the goods?

The Queen’s Gambit follows Elizabeth Harman (Anya Taylor-Joy), a fictional chess protege, on her journey from timid orphan to chess royalty. Along the way, Harman must overcome substance addiction, lingering trauma, sexism, and a whole host of other woes that come packaged with her brilliant mind. It is, in many ways, the troubled genius story that’s been explored many times before. The Queen’s Gambit doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a pleasurable watch.

Taylor-Joy’s performance deserves great praise. She strikes a balance between portraying both Harman’s sharp intellect and her tortured soul, which is a consistent joy to watch on screen. The moments when we see the cost of Harman’s fantastic ability — when we see the lows that she falls to because of it — are among the most powerful moments the show has on offer. A big part of those moments hitting as hard as they do is Taylor-Joy’s performance. Harman also rocks one of the best wardrobes I’ve seen in television in a long time, as do the rest of the cast – whoever was in charge of the costume department for The Queen’s Gambit never fails to hit the nail on the head.

Dramatically, The Queen’s Gambit is water-tight. Every piece on the script’s board moves as it should to achieve a gratifying victory; the show puts in all the right work to earn the mouthfuls of pay-off it feeds the audience in its final episode. Still, the dramatic moves it makes are very much by the book. Some might find it derivative or cliche, but personally, I enjoyed how undemanding and watchable the series is.

While the world of chess professionals, with their international tournaments and superstar status, is deeply enticing and is another of the series’ main hooks, there is great missed potential in this department. That world has some genuinely fun and compelling side characters, but the bread and butter of that level of chess are never delved into as much as they could be. The audience is never really shown the board long enough to understand what’s happening, and the matches are more centred around the faces of the players. The characters clearly take precedence over the chess, and this is serviceable. However, the concept of a chess game is far too ripe with potential for visually absorbing sequences to be so neglected by a series centred around chess.

Another gripe I have with this series is that it plays like a biopic, but it is entirely fictional. You almost feel cheated out of a great true story when you go to google Elizabeth Harman. According to Wikipedia, there are currently 37 female chess grandmasters – why make a series like this and not draw upon some of these women’s stories? They would undoubtedly make as good a series as The Queen’s Gambit, and this is yet another example of this show reeking of missed potential.

The Queen’s Gambit is a highly enjoyable watch – but in my eyes, the crown of the best chess series is still up for grabs. I hope someone can claim it.

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I thought the acting was superb by the lead actress – I thought the story was beautiful- very sad in places but not a sad drama overall. It’s one I will watch again in the future (I rarely watch a film again). I think this series should be up for some awards – loved it!

Another gripe I have of this stuck-up “review” is it reeking of missed potential. I thought The Queen’s Gambit was absolutely great !

This is pure feminist propaganda fantasy. The BEST female chess player is 82nd in the world. The female lead is a very unpleasant character, patronising and self-serving. Still, it will please the man-hating feminists. Strange that it’s written by a man, or is it?.

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One Good Thing

One Good Thing: Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit makes chess mesmerizing. Really!

The seven-episode miniseries shows why Anya Taylor-Joy is one of the most exciting actors working today.

by Emily St. James

Beth, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, studies a chessboard before a tournament.

Chess shouldn’t be all that interesting to watch on screen, for probably obvious reasons. The game involves a lot of people sitting and staring at a board, moving pieces around in quiet contemplation. And unless you’re a major chess fan, the moves the players make won’t immediately make sense in the way a baseball player hitting a home run does.

But something that is interesting to watch onscreen is a great actor playing a compelling character who has a lot going on in their mind. A close-up on the actor’s face as the wheels turn in the character’s head can be gripping because attempting to think your way out of a problem is something we all have experienced.

So the smartest choice Scott Frank makes in adapting Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit into a seven-episode Netflix miniseries is to focus not on the chess but on his actors’ faces, particularly that of his star. As chess prodigy Beth Harmon, Anya Taylor-Joy gives one of my favorite performances in ages. And Frank shows an understated confidence in relying not on fancy camera tricks but on close-ups that watch the star’s slightly too-wide eyes flicker with recognition as she finds the move to trounce yet another challenger.

The central conflict of the miniseries isn’t Beth vs. a world that keeps underestimating her, as it seems to be on its face. The central conflict is the viewer vs. Beth, as you try to find your way inside her rapidly whirring brain, and almost do, before she shuts you out again.

Beth is an orphan in 1950s Kentucky, who discovers an abiding love of chess almost by accident, thanks to a gruff old janitor (Bill Camp) who works at the orphanage she is sent to after her mother dies in a car accident. (Isla Johnston plays Beth as an orphaned child before Taylor-Joy takes over the role when Beth turns 15.) But when Beth is adopted by a middle-aged couple in the early 1960s and encouraged by her adoptive mother (Marielle Heller) to pursue her chess hobby further, she rapidly starts climbing the ranks of the world’s best players.

That’s kind of it, so far as the story goes. The Queen’s Gambit is an underdog narrative —nobody expects a woman to be good at chess! — meshed with a coming-of-age character study. How much of Beth’s motivation stems from the uncertainty of her childhood, of her adoption, of her bouncing from an orphanage to public school as a teenager? And how badly do the addictions that she develops to pills and alcohol, almost as part of her training, hinder her progress?

Her traumas and her addictions must drive her on some level, but at no point does she monologue painfully and at length about how losing her mother pushed her to be better. She just has to be better because she has to be better. If she ever stopped and looked too closely at the reasons she behaves the way she does, she might completely fall apart.

Taylor-Joy is one of my favorite performers working today, and she’s exceptional here. The best chess players in the world know when they’ve won or lost dozens of moves ahead of the game’s completion. Thus, chess very much is a game of faces, and Taylor-Joy’s cerebral acting meshes perfectly with Beth’s story. She’s an actor of micro-expressions, of flickers of eyes and twitches of lips, and what makes The Queen Gambit such a good fit for her is the way she keeps both the viewer and Beth’s opponents at arm’s length.

Competition stories are often a great way to do character studies, especially when the competitions are one-on-one. Weirdly, the story I thought of most often while watching The Queen’s Gambit was Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film Raging Bull . The surface resemblance between the two is faint, but they’re both about self-destructive, preternaturally talented people who wrestle with the gendered expectations of the society they exist in, with top-notch performances from actors at the height of their craft.

I spent most of The Queen’s Gambit nervous that the miniseries was going to become a story about Beth having to learn how to be a woman or something because she has turned off so much of herself to focus on being great at chess. But Frank’s scripts focus not on something so clichéd but on Beth stubbornly hammering at her own humanity until it fits the peculiar circumstances of her existence. The series is about how the mere fact of her being a woman causes other players to underestimate her, but only on its margins. By the time she’s credibly competing for the US championship, everybody takes her seriously. The Queen’s Gambit is not a story about a woman overcoming the odds to show the world her girl power; it’s a story about a woman overcoming the odds to understand herself. (And lest I leave the impression the series is all Taylor-Joy, the entire cast of the miniseries is perfect.)

It’s also a miniseries about chess, one that slowly but surely teaches you important truths about the game, so that by the time Beth is playing the much-vaunted Soviet chess players, you get the gist of the games, even if you don’t grasp each and every nuance. You’ll understand just why it’s advantageous to play white instead of black, but you’ll also understand how the built-in disadvantage black holds reflects some of the ways Beth sees herself, even if she would never say that.

Another movie I thought of while watching The Queen’s Gambit was Mike Leigh’s terrific 2008 comedy Happy-Go-Lucky . What I love about that movie is that its central character — an extraordinarily kind and, well, happy-go-lucky woman — doesn’t undergo some awkward character arc in which she realizes the world is darker and more cynical than she expected. Instead, she forces the world to realize the viability of her point of view.

The Queen’s Gambit has flaws. It’s maybe a little too long. Frank is perhaps slightly too enamored of watching his star cavort around in her underwear. And the series’ one major character of color (Beth’s Black best friend Jolene, played wonderfully by Moses Ingram) is a thankless role. But The Queen’s Gambit also has a healthy dose of Happy-Go-Lucky- ness at its core, in a way that almost makes it a mirror image of that film. Beth Harmon forces the world to reckon first with her talent and then with her pain. The world bends around her in turn, without pressuring her to be anything she’s not. Sometimes, that’s enough.

The Queen’s Gambit is streaming on Netflix . For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

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The Queen's Gambit: Miniseries Reviews

There's something a little Twin Peak-y about Harmon's drug-addled world, but it is not a genre show either. This is a series about a kick-ass little girl who becomes a superhero in a highly-competitive man's world.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2022

When you start dreaming about chess after watching a single episode, you'll know you're hooked.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2022

Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely impressive in a show that glows with trust in the filmmaking process. A story around self-stimulation, power of mind, adversities, forgetting what's written and the danger of the uncontrolled. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 30, 2021

A glamorous Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't show the true cost of addiction - but rather a rose-tinted view of womanhood and paint-by-numbers redemption.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 8, 2021

While the chess matches themselves were exhilarating to witness-yes, they really were-it was the relationships Beth forms throughout the series that truly gave this stunning period piece unexpected soul.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2021

The absence of villains, especially for an American show portraying Cold War era Russians, complements the dignity of the show.

Full Review | Mar 30, 2021

Chess may be the central subject of this spectacular Netflix series, but make no mistake in thinking that The Queen's Gambit is solely about this game of strategy. It's about so much more.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 29, 2021

An empowering tale about a female chess prodigy that, thankfully for amateurs, does not get bogged down in fine details and is still satisfying to those who do know the game.

Full Review | Mar 9, 2021

...an instant classic, as meaningful to the literate over-thinker as to casual audiences, and exactly the kind of original project that rarely seemed to find purchase in cinema over the last few decades...

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 10, 2021

Jury's out, but it's one of the best series of the year, I would definitely say so. Well-crafted and directed.

Full Review | Jan 19, 2021

Not the best series Iv'e ever seen, but it's really up there. Well-crafted and fun.

It may be a surprise that a show about chess has become one of Netflix's most-streamed shows of the past couple of weeks. But it shouldn't be -- not when it is filled with standout performances and its chess competitions play out like boxing matches.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2021

Raise your hand if you anticipated a coming-of-age, period-piece drama about a female chess prodigy in the 1950s and 1960s becoming perhaps the most addictive and binge-worthy series of 2020.

Full Review | Jan 4, 2021

Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't make a single false move in The Queen's Gambit.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2020

It is a show that takes itself so seriously that, when former child actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster turns up dressed like an escapee from the Wild West, you don't know whether it's meant to be funny or not

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 29, 2020

Written and directed by Scott Frank, an Oscar nominee for his "Logan" script, "Queen's" is electrifying. Frank's direction is full of quick cuts, artful framing and beautiful shots.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 29, 2020

Yes, this is a series about a chess player, but it is more about her journey there and the heavy and deep emotions that take you through the path is what makes this a must-watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 29, 2020

It's a terrific, emotionally intelligent hour of television - one that refuses to distinguish between the cost of sporting immortality and the price of human history.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2020

One of its strengths is knowing when to leave a good thing alone - much of the dialogue is word-for-word what Tevis wrote.

"Alma's not pathetic, she's just stuck," says Beth about her adopted mother. I can't think of a better way to summarize this unfortunately arrested miniseries.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Dec 29, 2020

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the queen's gambit.

When you read the words “Netflix limited drama series about addiction, obsession, trauma, and chess,” the first adjective which springs to mind is probably not “thrilling.” But here we are, and “The Queen’s Gambit,” Scott Frank ’s adaptation of Walter Tevis ’ coming-of-age novel of the same name, absolutely demands the use of “thrilling.” Anchored by a magnetic lead performance and bolstered by world-class acting, marvelous visual language, a teleplay that’s never less than gripping, and an admirable willingness to embrace contradiction and ambiguity, it’s one of the year’s best series. While not without flaws, it is, in short, a triumph. And it is satisfying not just as a compelling period drama, a character study, and a feast for the eyes. It’s also, at its heart, a sports movie wrapped up in the vestments of a prestige TV series. Ask yourself this: When is the last time you fist-pumped the air over chess? Isn’t that something you deserve?

Odds are that Beth Harmon (the remarkable Anya Taylor-Joy ) will earn quite a few fist-pumps as people discover Frank and co-creator Alan Scott ’s excellent series. We meet Beth as an eight-year-old (Isla Johnson) when she’s left impossibly unharmed—physically, at least—by the car crash that kills her mother. Her father’s not in the picture, so Beth finds herself at a Christian school for orphans. While there, she develops three things: a friendship with Jolene (newcomer Moses Ingram, excellent), a passion for chess, and a physical and emotional dependence on the little green tranquilizers fed to the children until they’re outlawed by the state. When she finally leaves the school, she’s got those last two things packed in her suitcase alongside a bunch of chess books, a sizable ego, some unexplored trauma, and no small amount of self-loathing. But it’s the game that drives her, sending her both to the heights of the competitive chess world and, increasingly, to her hoard of pills and the oblivion offered by alcohol.

In short, Beth has a lot to handle. Luckily, Anya Taylor-Joy is more than up to the task. Playing Beth from 15 onward, Taylor-Joy gives the kind of performance that only becomes more riveting the longer you sit with it. It’s a turn of both intoxicating glamour and precious little vanity, internal without ever being closed-off, heartbreakingly vulnerable and sharply funny, often at once. Much of the story hinges on when and how Beth is alone—and sometimes she’s most alone when surrounded by people—and Taylor-Joy’s performance is particularly remarkable in these moments. Scenes of Beth alone in her home, in a stranger’s apartment, on a plane, in her bed at night—they all hum with the kind of energy that only arises when one is truly unobserved. In this case, however, she’s creating that energy in a room full of cameras and crew members. That kind of honesty and release is the stuff of acting legend, like Eleanora Duse’s blush . It’s yet another high watermark in a young career already full of them, and somehow she’s never better than when Beth is sitting silently behind a chess board.

We’ll come back to those scenes, but it would be a mistake to assume that Taylor-Joy’s only great scene partner is the camera, gazing from across the 64 squares of the board. Frank and casting director Ellen Lewis assembled an ensemble of heavy-hitters, including the great Bill Camp as the isolated janitor who introduces Beth to the game, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Harry Melling as rivals and eventual allies in the chess world, the wonderful (if underused) Ingram, and director Marielle Heller , who gives a hypnotic performance as the fragile, damaged, compassionate woman who eventually welcomes Beth into her home. There’s not a dud in the bunch; even the actors who show up for a scene or two at most give performances that feel fully inhabited. It’s a stunner of an ensemble.

And here’s a bonus: they all look incredible. “The Crown” is rightly praised for its sumptuous, detailed production design and costuming, and “The Queen’s Gambit” will likely find itself compared to its Netflix predecessor with some frequency. But for all the strengths of “The Crown,” it rarely showcases the kind of imagination on display here. Costume designer Gabriele Binder , hair and makeup head Daniel Parker , and production designer Uli Hanisch (the latter of “ Cloud Atlas ,” “Sense8,” and “Babylon Berlin”) do much more than capture the look and feel of the 1960s in the United States and abroad. They use that aesthetic to illuminate Beth’s mindset. When does Beth embrace the wilder aspects of ‘60s makeup? Why, when she’s balancing precariously on the edge and her thick eyeliner serves to make her look even thinner and more fragile. That’s one example of many. It’s incredibly thoughtful and stylish. Consider it isolated breakdown chic.

The aesthetic of Beth’s inner world is also explored, though to detail what that looks like and what it means is to diminish some of the pleasure (and anxiety) it engenders. Just know that it lends Beth’s struggles a visceral energy that most stories of addiction tend to either take for granted or overplay. And for the most part, that care and thoughtfulness is found in all of the tropes present in “The Queen’s Gambit” (and there are plenty of tropes—this is a sports movie in disguise, after all). That said, Frank’s largely excellent teleplays do occasionally stumble, particularly when it comes to race (Jolene deserves better) and gender. The latter is a shortcoming shared with Frank’s “Godless”—both have their hearts in the right place, but are perhaps not as thoughtful or insightful when it comes to sex, love, and the realities of a patriarchal society than they believe themselves to be.

Frankly, it’s hard to get too worked up about those shortcomings thought, especially when the chess starts. The chess! My god, the chess. Like any good sports movie, this character-driven period drama lives and dies by its editing. Editor Michelle Tesoro should go ahead and buy a bookshelf for all the hardware she’s about to pick up for “The Queen’s Gambit” right now; the chess sequences are all electric, and each in its own way. One will make you hold your breath. Two will likely bring you to tears. Some are funny. Some are infuriating. Some are, somehow, very, very sexy. Each is electric, and Tesoro and Taylor-Joy make them so through skill, talent, and precision. (Some credit here is also due to chess consultants Bruce Pandolfini and Garry Kasparov. I know very little about chess, but somehow “The Queen’s Gambit” convinced me otherwise and dazzled me all at once.)

Every truly great sports story has not one, but two beating hearts. There’s the sport itself, a game or competition in which the viewer becomes undeniably invested. And then there’s the player or players, someone whose life is much bigger than the game, yet is nevertheless somewhat consumed by it. “The Queen’s Gambit” has both those hearts, and both are racing. Frank, Taylor-Joy, and company never stop telling both those stories at once, and the result is a fascinating portrait of a young woman fighting to become the person she wants to be, battling for victory and for peace. When her journey brings her to Paris, she remembers the words of a woman who loved her and spends some time wandering museums, feeding her soul with something more than chess. Yet there’s never any doubt that somewhere, in some corner of her mind, she’s got her eyes on the board. What a privilege it is to see that corner and see the world’s beauty, all at once.

Now available on Netflix

Allison Shoemaker

Allison Shoemaker is a freelance film and television critic based in Chicago.

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Film credits.

The Queen's Gambit (2020)

Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon

Harry Melling as Harry Beltik

Thomas Brodie Sangster as Benny

Chloe Pirrie as Alice Harmon

Marielle Heller as Alma Wheatley

Scott Frank
Walter Tevis
Allan Scott

Cinematographer

Steven Meizler
Michelle Tesoro
Carlos Rafael Rivera

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‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Review: Coming of Age, One Move at a Time

Anya Taylor-Joy plays a brilliant and troubled young woman who medicates herself with chess in Scott Frank’s mini-series for Netflix.

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By Mike Hale

Openings matter a great deal in chess, and “ The Queen’s Gambit, ” a new Netflix mini-series about a wunderkind of the game, uses its first few minutes for the purposes of misdirection. A young woman wakes up in a disordered Paris hotel room and washes down some pills with minibar booze while racing to dress for a Very Important Game of Chess. The period is the late 1960s and the vibe is Holly Golightly groovy wild child.

But “ Gambit ,” whose seven episodes premiere on Friday, pulls that particular rug out from under us right away. It jumps back a decade or so, to when Beth, the fictional future prodigy (played as a child by Isla Johnston), is placed in a Kentucky orphanage after surviving the car crash that kills her mother. It’s a repressively parochial place that keeps the girls sedate by feeding them tranquilizers from a big glass jar, but the awkward, introverted Beth finds another kind of escape when she discovers chess.

This opening episode — written and directed, as is the whole series, by Scott Frank (“Godless”) based on a novel by Walter Tevis — has an enchanting, storybook feel. Beth stumbles on the game when she’s sent on an errand to the basement lair of the orphanage’s forbidding custodian, Mr. Shaibel (a canny, finely etched performance by Bill Camp). The game immediately makes sense to her — when nothing else in her life does — and at night she runs through the moves he teaches her on an imaginary board she sees among the shadows of the prisonlike dormitory where she sleeps.

From there, as Beth (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy ) is adopted out of the orphanage and her prowess gradually gains public notice, “Gambit” proceeds straightforwardly through her teenage years, showing us how she becomes the glamorous but troubled chess pro of that opening scene. It follows the beats of a sports tale, like a classic Hollywood boxing film, but it’s also a coming-of-age story about a woman succeeding in a male-dominated world, and a restrained spin on an addiction saga, as Beth rises in the chess hierarchy on a steady diet of alcohol and downers.

Frank wraps it all up in a package that’s smart, smooth and snappy throughout, like finely tailored goods. The production has a canny combination of retro Rat Pack style, in its décors and music choices, with a creamy texture, in its performances and cinematography, that is reminiscent of another Netflix period piece, “The Crown.” (This connection is reinforced by the abundance of British actors playing the American roles, including Taylor-Joy and, as three mentors and competitors for Beth’s affection, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and Harry Melling.)

“Gambit” never quite gets back to the charm of its Dickensian opening chapter, though, and it gets thinner as it goes along. Frank pulls off his combination of themes with a lot of old-Hollywood-style skill, but in the mix, neither the sports nor the personal-demons story line hits the levels of visceral excitement or emotional payoff that you might want. In the end, it was an admirable package that I wanted to love more than I did.

That may have had something to do with the construct around which the story is built. Beth finds a refuge in chess — it’s a predictable place where she feels safe and in control. And we’re shown why she needs a refuge, beginning with flashbacks to life with her brilliant, troubled biological mother (Chloe Pirrie) and continuing through her teen years with her alcoholic, depressed adoptive mom (an excellent Marielle Heller, who directed the female coming-of-age film “The Diary of a Teenage Girl").

Both of those elements make sense. But the question that becomes the central theme of the series — whether Beth can overcome, or even survive, the obsessiveness that powers her success and the anger that’s reflected in her superaggressive style of play — is primarily melodramatic, a fact reflected in the show’s unsatisfying conclusion.

Beth has some stumbles as she progresses from local phenom to international sensation, but they’re negligible. “Gambit” is nominally a story about overcoming great odds, but in form, it’s really a race against time: Will Beth’s remorseless rise reach a satisfying conclusion (a victory over a courtly Russian champion played by Marcin Dorocinski) before she flames out?

It’s not hard to put that out of your head and enjoy the show’s immediate pleasures, though. They include the performances of Camp, Heller, Brodie-Sangster and Taylor-Joy, who doesn’t go deep inside Beth — that would be a different show — but finds the intelligence and the humanity that lie just beneath her tics and frostiness. And Frank gives them entertaining scenes to play, as Beth gradually discovers the world — chess takes her on a journey from the Midwest to Las Vegas, New York, Paris and Moscow — and embarrassingly defeats one man after another, in chess-game scenes that are staged and shot in different, clever ways throughout the series.

If it doesn’t win you over, “Gambit” will at least play you to a draw.

Mike Hale is a television critic. He also writes about online video, film and media. He came to The Times in 1995 and worked as an editor in Sports, Arts & Leisure and Weekend Arts before becoming a critic in 2009. More about Mike Hale

The 50 best TV shows of 2020, No 9: The Queen’s Gambit

Anya Taylor-Joy was brilliant as a fiercely determined woman battling sexism and personal demons on her way to the top of the chess world in the 60s

T he Queen’s Gambit came from nowhere, but suddenly, it seemed as if everyone was talking about it. Its timing was perfect. As the nights drew in and the days grew colder, it was television to hunker down to, as absorbing as it was lovely to look at, a triumphant fantasy with just enough of a bleak side, wrapped up in beautiful costumes and gorgeous scenery.

Adapted from Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel, it is a coming-of-age story following chess genius Beth Harmon on her rise to world domination. She learned to play in the same orphanage where she picked up a childhood addiction to tranquillisers and both would go on to dominate her teenage years. The series followed her from her tentative early games in the basement with the janitor who nurtured her talent, through local tournaments, national tournaments, and eventually, all the way to Moscow, where she was pitted against the very best in the world.

As Beth, Anya Taylor-Joy was a wonder, capturing her bloody-minded determination in all aspects of her life, from playing chess to drinking, from drugs to men (and one ambiguous shot of a woman – what happens in Paris stays in Paris). If you looked closely, you could see the emotional strings that were being pulled, but it didn’t matter. There is such power in watching a young woman who is underestimated at every turn succeed against all expectations. It was more moving than I thought it would be. It was also more exciting. Who knew that chess could be so riveting, particularly when it is clothed in impeccable 60s fashion and is batting away sexist and patriarchal assumptions by the pawn?

Was it flawless television? Not quite. Some felt that Beth’s triumphs were too much of a given, or that it wasn’t gritty enough when it came to its tougher storylines about self-destruction. But I don’t think it needed to be flawless. It was classic, elegant television, the kind that, had it been a film, would have become a Sunday afternoon staple. Its ability to sweep viewers up in its mood was uncanny; its devotion to style and interiors – that furniture! that wallpaper! – immaculate. It was also more subtle than it appeared to be on the surface. The flashbacks to young Beth’s relationship with her mother were harrowing, but her adoptive mother Alma, played by Marielle Heller , brought a more complex flavour. (Heller is also a director, who made the brilliant Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me?) Alma is a drinker and depressive who had talents of her own, but with just a generation between her and Beth, her options were limited, and she did not know what to do with them. Theirs was an ambiguous pairing, tender but functional, never entirely on steady ground. The scenes between Taylor-Joy and Heller were often the best.

Chess has certainly done well out of The Queen’s Gambit. There haven’t been many chess dramatisations to date, but this one seems to have cracked the winning formula, and I expect a steady flow of documentaries in its wake. Through some clever hallucinatory tricks and expert choreography, its matches were filled with sporting bounce. It was tense and gripping. It placed viewers right at the heart of the competition, even viewers who could not tell a bishop from a king. Sales of chess sets have rocketed in its wake, and sign-ups to chess sites have ballooned. No wonder. The Queen’s Gambit made it look possible, and thrilling, in a year when thrills have been in short supply.

Anya Taylor-Joy

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The Queen's Gambit - Review

Anya taylor-joy's performance is the high point of netflix's surprisingly engaging (but often overwrought) chess drama the queen's gambit, a limited series based on the walter tevis novel..

This is a mostly spoiler-free review for Netflix's new limited series The Queen's Gambit, which is now streaming globally.

Chess and lively aren’t usually used in the same sentence. But when a series comes along that’s centered around a child prodigy - in this case, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), who arrives as an orphan at the Methuen Home for Girls after the tragic death of her mother - you can’t help but be stimulated by the premise, even if the results are uneven.

Scott Frank, Allan Scott, and William Horberg developed The Queen’s Gambit from the absorbing 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis (The Hustler and The Color of Money). But surprisingly, the seven-episode miniseries isn’t dialogue-heavy; mostly because Beth is so taciturn. Alluringly directed by Frank, who also wrote the series, Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit finds its closest comparisons in Queen of Katwe and Pawn Sacrifice by centering its narrative on a woman prodigy who fights through the weight of genius.

Beth is ruthless on the chessboard. As one player surmises, she’s all attack. She strikes with a deadly accuracy born from an intuitive wit. But she can’t overcome the Russian Grandmaster Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski). As opposed to her chess pieces, he’s immovable. The drama of their matches, and Beth’s battles with other lesser opponents, are driven by Taylor-Joy’s evocative performance. Her work, much of it captured through resolute close-ups, sees her micro-expressions outwardly emitting the fury, confusion, and fearless strategies firing off inside Beth’s mind. These scenes are difficult cracks to squeeze through for Taylor-Joy, because any of these eureka moments could play as cheap theatrics. But Taylor-Joy keeps the drama as grounded as the pieces she slides across the board. The show hangs on her every deliberate glance, and she delivers.

Her battles are further imbued with immense gravity due to The Queen’s Gambit’s impeccable craft. The rapid give-and-go rhythms of a chess match are wonderfully on display, not only in Taylor-Joy’s electrifying performance, but through Michelle Tesoro’s captivating editing. Intuitive split screens, such as a Brady Bunch-inspired tile format, and a shot where the spaces on the chessboard become individual frames depicting ongoing matches, transform a sedentary game into a dynamic act. The sound, an element you wouldn’t expect to take on such great importance for a sport that’s as quiet as golf, makes every chess piece hit the board with the dramatic intensity of a torpedo. The action allows viewers who may know very little of this ancient game, like the difference between the Siscilian or the Najdorf Variation, to be completely immersed. Mixed with Carlos Rafael Rivera’s enchanting piano score, the close-ups of these tic-tac-toe-esque moves are breathtaking. Thankfully, much of the series operates through these enthralling matches.

The Queen’s Gambit’s supporting characters are like the pawns on Beth’s board; their purposes are limited. The custodian Mr. Schaibel (Bill Camp) is a craggy fellow who teaches her the game of chess in the school’s basement. Jolene (Moses Ingram), Beth’s black best friend in the orphanage, shows her the ropes of living in the school. She also coaxes the young Beth into savoring her tranquilizing pills (a soon-to-be debilitating habit for the young girl). D.L. Townes (there’s a sly joke in that name) is a fleeting crush for Beth, but he also falls by the wayside. Other characters suffer the same fate. They enter as fascinating figures yet diminish into passing intrigues. The script is just too slight. It’s a miniseries that’d probably work better as a movie.

Once Beth is adopted by Mrs. Alma (Marielle Heller, director of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), she becomes an outcast at her high school: The popular girls tease her for her bargain-basement attire and garish brown shoes. But when Mrs. Alma learns how much money Beth can earn from chess, the prodigy traces around the country to tournament after tournament. Their relationship heralds a tedious subplot; the perpetually sick Mrs. Alma drinks due to an unhappy marriage. A talented pianist suffering from stage fright, she’s stuck. She can only be two things: A mother or a housewife. As both, Mrs. Alma is laissez-faire: She allows Beth to drink, party, and smoke. The two don’t just bond over their shared vices, but their loneliness too. The potential exists for the subplot to crack the hardened shell of both Beth and Mrs. Alma. But even with Heller’s tender performance, very little between the pair bubbles to the surface that isn’t already floating at the top.

Muted in color and lighting — the scenes are so dark you’d wonder if anyone owned a lamp during the 60s — The Queen’s Gambit looks as dreary as a rain cloud over a scrapyard outside of the chess matches. It's an odd decision considering the hipness of the swinging’ 60s should allow for the vibrant attire to pop on even the most formal clothing. Even when Beth visits Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Paris, vivid cities with rich architecture, the municipalities are reduced to drab locales. Beth might only see the world in grey, but why must we be subjected to the same dull imagery? Ryan Murphy’s Ratched, a show set during the ‘50s, might have had a terrible story but the series had the pizzazz completely right.

The Queen’s Gambit also hasn’t met a phallic symbol it didn’t like. Take one of the many scenes of Beth lying in bed calculating chess permutations, a bird’s eye view shot shows a queen’s shadow sliding up her body. Another sees Beth calling home to her mom during a drug-filled party next to a penis-shaped candle. They’re manifestations of Beth’s eternal loneliness. There’s a mechanism inside of her that blows up her relationships before they happen. Her prohibitions arise from a gnawing fear of either becoming a housewife or relying on a man. In fact, Beth combats two adversarial men in the chess world, the nerdy Harry Beltik (Harry Melling) and the cocky cowboy Benny (Thomas Brodie-Sangster). And both float very closely to being possible lovers.

They buoy the action even when the melodrama shifts towards being overpowering. Take the final episode, when Beth confronts her drinking habit. Her struggles with alcohol and pills, fueled by the tragic memories of her biological mother’s death, would hit so much harder if they weren’t so predictable by modern storytelling standards: The number of narratives with geniuses suffering through the weight of their genius feels infinite at this point. And the way Frank utilizes Jolene as the magical black friend is even more formulaic. By the time the narrative shifts to Russia, when Beth faces Bergov for their final showdown, The Queen’s Gambit becomes something akin to Rocky IV. The previously suspicious Russians take Beth into their hearts, and it’d all be absurd if not for the inherent excitement of watching these tense chess matches.

The Verdict

Undeveloped supporting characters, and predictable arcs born from cheesy melodrama, often hamstring The Queen’s Gambit. Writer-director Scott Frank struggles to tease out the profound social justice themes he places on his board, such as sexism, racism, and addiction. Luckily for him, he has Taylor-Joy delivering a ruminative performance that’s as complex as any opening gambit her character employs. Meanwhile, each episode flies at a rapid pace. Even at its most contrived, The Queen’s Gambit never slows down enough to bore you.