It felt like the Cinderella tropes crossed with Hollywood obsessions.
Production and acting was great, but a good story should at least be somewhat believable. Drugs and alcohol and these highly "rational" intellectual pursuits don't really mix. I had a hard time believing anyone, regardless of gender or race, would be able to perform competitively by habitually binging on drugs and alcohol that are well known to dull the senses. Perhaps in the more artistic pursuits one would have an advantage if they could see things differently with an altered perception, but chess is objective and requires utmost mental clarity.
We all need aspirations to get by, and having a strong, talented heroine competing in a game dominated by men is a wonderful story if told right. Yet believability is subjective. Knowing the "vibe" of the kind of people that win national championships in intellectual games give off, prevents me from enjoy the story as most other people would. There's just not enough passion, not enough drive for self-improvement, not enough emphasis on self-discipline, and too much pettiness, too much plebbery. At a world championship level, every player is blessed with all the talent that is humanly possible -- it is a statistical impossibility that anybody, regardless of gender or race, could rely on mostly talent and barge in and win while being distracted by serious personal issues on the side. You compete by giving up less important things in your life to focus on doing what it takes make it to the very top. And the sad truth is that, the privileged requires fewer sacrifices. Hollywood made a valiant attempt at balancing our protagonist's passion, character and talent with her emotional struggles to make things relatable with the average viewer, but in retrospect given the ecosystem there, there's probably no way it could have succeeded in writing anything remotely believable (to me at least).
Cinderella is a more believable story if it had a fairy than if it had not. But the audience wanted a fairytale without a fairy-godmother nor a prince charming. The modern woman is too independent for that, they say. And so, after experimenting with drugs, alcohol and sex, the girl in dirty rags suddenly became Queen on her own, without even really half-struggling, just because.
The funny thing is, while women and men do of course pull off some incredible feats in real life by winning some sort of lottery (often genetic), the rules of fiction is different. Truth is stranger than fiction, they say, and I think they're right. You need a fairy in a fairytale. A story of some person winning some kind of lottery, then living happily ever after, makes for a horrible story because it's "unrealistic", even though this happens to many people on a daily basis.
