New Yorker contributor Richard Brody explores the stumbling blocks of the biopic genre in a review of “Pawn Sacrifice,” a new drama based on the life of chess champion Bobby Fischer. While dramas seek to explain human behavior, real life is rarely containable by the mechanism of explicable causes leading to obvious effects.
This, Brody argues, is the flaw of the biopic genre and of movies about geniuses in particular, since the realm of genius is in a different dimension from that of common sense. Read the article here.