The Coldest Game

The Coldest Game
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Łukasz Kośmicki
Screenplay by	Łukasz Kośmicki Marcel Sawicki
Produced by	Piotr Woźniak-Starak Krzysztof Terej Daniel Baur
Starring	Bill Pullman Lotte Verbeek James Bloor Robert Więckiewicz
Cinematography	Paweł Edelman
Edited by	Robert Gryka Wolfgang Weigl Krzysztof Arszennik[1]
Music by	Łukasz Targosz
Production company	Watchout Studio
Release date	November 8, 2019 (2019-11-08)
Running time	103 minutes[2]
Country	Poland
Language	English

The Coldest Game (Polish: Ukryta gra) is a 2019 English-language Polish spy film. It is directed by Łukasz Kośmicki and stars Bill Pullman as Joshua Mansky, an American alcoholic former chess champion who becomes involved in a Cold War confrontation between nuclear superpowers.

This spy thriller is the last film produced by Piotr Woźniak-Starak, who died in an apparent boating accident shortly before the premiere.^[3]

Plot[]

The film is based on a fictional event set against the backdrop of real history and the political atmosphere of the time.

In 1962, in the middle of the Cold War Cuban Missile Crisis, fictional American chess player Joshua Mansky (Bill Pullman) walks onstage towards his Soviet opponent, fictional Soviet champion Alexander Gavrylov (Evgeniy Sidikhin). Mansky is a surprise replacement for the American player Konigsberg, whose sudden death nearly cancelled the match.

Seven days earlier, Mansky, a former chess champion and mathematical genius now reduced to severe alcoholism and counting cards at blackjack, was abducted while exiting a bar. He was drugged and flown to the US embassy in Warsaw. CIA Agents Stone, White, and Novak discuss his credentials, which include top math scores at Princeton under Albert Einstein and triumph in a chess match, 17 years before, over the suddenly departed Konigsberg.

The agents disclose their plan to Mansky: tournament regulations allow a player to be replaced only by the last player to beat him, who turns out to be Mansky thanks to that win 17 years ago. Mansky reluctantly agrees to serve.

At the championship, Mansky is housed in hotel quarters in that vast edifice of Stalinist Realism, Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science, which also houses the match. Mansky is befriended by Party bigwig and former Polish Resistance hero Alfred (Robert Wieckiewicz), now enjoying a plush sinecure as the director of the Palace of Culture. The Soviets have dispatched Alfred as Mansky's 'minder,' tasked with keeping him well lubricated and supervised. To that end, Alfred deploys an impressive arsenal of obscure Polish vodkas, ingenious hiding places and secret tunnels.

Mansky turns out to be an eccentric chess player with odd gifts even for a game known for weird personalities and unpredictable behavior. The Soviet strategy of keeping him drunk turns out to enhance his skills: he wins his first match, while drunk, in 32 moves. The Soviets then employ a series of Boris-and-Natasha ploys, with varying success. Mansky and Alfred become friends, bonding first over smooth potato vodka and later over rebellious individualism.

The plot thickens as we learn that espionage connected to the growing Cuban Missile Crisis is happening under the cover of the match, with spies and counterspies among the Embassy and Chess Championship delegations. There are rumors of moles, double agents, and efforts to smuggle microfilm. Meanwhile, Alfred and Mansky sneak out of the hotel for two memorable, historically accurate scenes: They visit a Warsaw speakeasy packed with revelers, goulash and vodka, departing to sway together in the moonlight in the rubble-strewn ruins of a Warsaw house as Alfred recounts his WWII Resistance heroism.

Rooms are bugged; agents are double; and the threat of poisoning rampant in the espionage plot while the chess match twists and turns in parallel. There are wins, losses and draws, all tied to the growing crisis in Cuba. Both sides in the chess match vie for international prestige while the Soviets chase the mole trying to get microfilm to the Americans, and the Americans suspect a traitor in their own ranks. Mansky grapples with his fluctuating capabilities, struggling to deliver chess wins to order. Like Alfred, he is ambivalent about the current government of his country. Alfred regrets the Soviet domination of Poland and Mansky regrets the assistance he once gave to Oppenheimer, facilitating the birth of nuclear weapons.

Just as the USSR and USA teeter on the brink of confrontation in Cuba, the espionage jockeying behind the scenes at the chess match reaches a crisis. There are lethal consequences for many players as the microfilm, moles, Mansky and both American and Soviet agents reach their inevitable confrontation. The friendship of Alfred and Mansky becomes crucial to Mansky's survival, at extraordinary risk for Alfred.

Advanced mathematics is also a player in the climax, as Mansky is able to use a classic logic puzzle to determine the authentic item among counterfeits, with implications for the safety of the entire world as the nuclear threat reaches its zenith.

The end of the film is bittersweet, with neither side able to claim complete moral victory.

Mansky's individualism and detachment from blind patriotism serve him well in the end.

Cast[]

Production[]

Filming took place from February to April 2018 in Warsaw. William Hurt, originally cast as Joshua Mansky, suffered an accident while returning from the film set to his apartment, just a few days into shooting, and was replaced by Bill Pullman.^[5]

The Coldest Game was the last film produced by Piotr Woźniak-Starak, who died shortly before the premiere. His death was ruled an accident. The cause of death was head trauma caused by a "sharp-edged tool", and it was claimed that the movie producer fell off his boat into a lake and had his head crushed by the propeller of his own boat. His cell phone remained on the boat. A 27-year-old woman who was also on the boat survived, and the movie producer's bodyguard reportedly attempted a suicide soon after.^[6][7][8]

Release[]

The film premiered on September 18, 2019 at the 44th Gdynia Polish Film Festival^[9] to positive critics' reviews^[10] and was released in Polish theaters on November 8, 2019.

The international release was planned for early 2020.^[11]

It was released globally via streaming on February 8, 2020 through Netflix.^[12]

Critical response[]

Writing for the Chicago Reader, Jamie Ludwig said: "You'd expect a film that involves espionage and a high-stakes chess tournament during the height of the Cold War to leave you on the edge of your seat. But then there's The Coldest Game. Bill Pullman (who stepped into the lead role after the original actor William Hurt was injured just before production began) gives a fantastic performance as Professor Joshua Mansky... kidnapped by government agents and brought to Warsaw to compete against the Russians at chess after their first pick was murdered. However, Pullman alone can't make up for a premise that never completely gels, immemorable characters (Robert Więckiewicz as the Palace of Culture and Science director is a welcome exception), and loads of cliches. A few moments of dark humor beg to transform the film into a Vonnegut-type satire - it might have been better served had it been steered in that direction."

In a 2 stars out of 4 review, Roger Moore from Movie Nation wrote: "I'm a sucker for a good Cold War thriller. A middling one? Yeah, I'll sit through one of those, too. The Coldest Game falls in the latter category... The whole affair - again, fictional - is a jumble of U-2 flights and intrigues, "quiet" rooms (bugs are everywhere) and booze. Pullman keeps up with it all, but he lost me here and there. But the Mid-Century Soviet fashion, furniture and design is properly gloomy... The performances are solid even when the story is at its most convoluted. And there are third act twists that atone for some of what's lacking in the first two."

Demetrios Matheou from the Screen Daily wrote: "This Cold War thriller [...] features a fruity premise and respectable talent on either side of the camera [...] And yet the end result of what is a clearly enthusiastic enterprise is remarkably average." He noted that the potential of a movie combining "spy intrigue, the historical crisis and the renowned temperament of the chess elite", obviously evoking the Fischer-Spassky match, was wasted. He had some praise for Pullman and Więckiewicz's performances and found the scenes depicting the pair's drunk escapade "effective", but also stated the chess matches were "a botched business, presented with no logic or tension". "A clunky script and endemic hyperactivity in all departments results in the kind of film that is more guilty pleasure than edge-of-seat thriller".

John Serba, writing for the Decider, gave the movie a negative review, centering his critism on Pullman's character, which he considered cartoonish and hammy. "A couple of the twists [...] are pretty good. The movie is reasonably strong down the stretch as it meets but doesn't surpass expectations of its genre. It's slickly produced in the sense that it has the clean, digital look of a production with a low budget that's trying to look expensive. It's fine. But the movie hinges on Pullman", whose "characterization of a hopeless boozer is so far over the top, it makes Charles Bukowski look like Ned Flanders. His character as written is thin-shaved lunch meat, and he just stacks up the ham."

Common Sense Media, which rates movies based on their family-friendliness, gave the movie 1 out of 5 stars because of high amounts of violence (4/5), language (4/5) and drinking, drugs and smoking (5/5).

Based on these five reviews, the film holds an approval rating of 0% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 3.5/10.^[13]

Relationship to real events[]

Cuban Missile Crisis[]

An important question in the movie is whether the Soviets already have nuclear warheads in Cuba, or are yet to ship them to Cuba. As told by Soviet general Gribkov in 1992^[14] (and repeated in the 2003 book Wilson's Ghost by McNamara & Blight), Soviet forces in Cuba at that point did have nuclear warheads there: 162 of them, including at least 90 tactical nuclear warheads; these warheads were just 90 miles from US shores. Furthermore, on October 26, 1962, the warheads were moved from their storage sites to positions closer to their delivery vehicles (missiles), to be launched in case of American invasion. According to McNamara, the Americans did not believe Soviet warheads were already in Cuba;^[15] if both Gribkov and McNamara are telling the truth, then the Americans decided on the course of action while not knowing how real the threat was.

The last vodka[]

The method of killing shown in the movie, dubbed "the last vodka" in the movie - injecting alcohol directly into the victim's bloodstream to fake accidental death from overdrinking - has long been alleged to be used by former communist secret service operatives in Poland to eliminate opponents and witnesses (or to perform example killings to scare others into silence). These allegations came mainly from anti-communists, including members of the opposition from the times when Poland was a one-party authoritarian communist state. A notable example is Sylwester Zych, a priest whom the police blamed for the death of one of their own. In 1989, Zych died, officially from alcohol poisoning, but surprisingly the concentration of alcohol in one of his arms was much higher than elsewhere in his body, suggesting the alcohol was injected in the arm, not taken orally.^[16]

See also[]

• A Beautiful Mind
• Polish People's Republic
• Cold War

References[]

External links[]

• The Coldest Game at IMDb
• The Coldest Game on ChessBase.com