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.