‘Computer Chess’: A Wholly Original Comedy

There’s no other movie like Computer Chess. It’s an idiosyncratic beast that plays by its own rules and no one else’s. Very, very few people are going to like it, but those who do will cherish it forever, and probably keep it alive on the cult circuit for years to come.

The year is close to 1984, and mankind seeks to create an artificial intelligence that can beat a person at chess. In a shoddy, out-of-the-way hotel, a group of programmers gather to pit their chess software against one another. The ultimate victor will win its designer $7500, and gets to compete against the tournament’s MC, the meekly self-important Gerald Peary (Pat Henderson). Over the course of a weekend, the programmers tinker with their creations in an effort to improve their chess skills.

Shot on video, it looks like an authentic relic from the 1980’s — a sort of quasi-mockumentary. The imagery is purposefully, sublimely ugly, a black-and-white that’s more like muddy-gray-and-sandy-gray. And the pitch-perfect period details of the production design, chock full of awful ties and mustaches straight from all our dads’ faces at the time, help make Computer Chess feel like it could be a lost film ala Miami Connection. After the initial setup, though, the movie drops the mockumentary conceit.

See, the focus isn’t really on the chess tournament. It’s on the people, and their maneuvers through interpersonal relations. These are all hopeless nerds, in an almost painfully true-to-life way. How they interact with one another and the other guests at the hotel, resembles a type of Noah Baumach-like awkwardness, flushed with mumblecore faux-realism (which makes sense, since director Andrew Bujalski essentially invented that movement with his debut, Funny Ha Ha).

Take MIT whiz Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester), who can smooth out coding flaws like a pro, but can’t talk to others to save his life. The film delights in pin-balling him from one cringing encounter to another, culminating to a meeting with an older couple who, we soon realize, are looking to swing with him. It’s uncomfortably, understatedly funny, but it’s also an avenue for Peter to reveal a surprisingly poetic side. The couple are part of another event at the hotel that weekend, a New Age therapy group who provide a touchy-feely counterbalance to the cold, logic-driven techies of the chess tournament. They try to convince Peter that he’s confined his life to a 64-square grid, but he talks about how those 64 squares contain nearly endless permutations in a quite eloquent way. These two halves could learn from one another, if only they could communicate properly.

Alas, they can’t, and failures of communication are the film’s primary source of amusement, and its main thematic concern. The geeks are trying to crack the riddle of getting a computer to understand what they want it to do. That’s the barrier to artificial intelligence itself: inventing a communicating being from the ground up. There are multiple philosophical conversations to this end, fortunately broken up by the misadventures of the characters. Lone wolf programmer Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), bereft of a place to stay, spends a night going from room to room, asking to be let in (while encountering a great many cats). Shelly Flintic, the first, lone woman to participate in the tournament, must weather the constant, misaimed come-ons from her contemporaries. The cast of mostly non-actors (the biggest name is Wiley Wiggins of Dazed and Confused) have nailed down a naturalistic patter that makes the bizarre situations they find themselves in all the funnier.

I honestly didn’t know what I thought of Computer Chess at first. It’s so very, deeply strange, starting out as a mockumentary/mumblecore hybrid and morphing into something avant garde as it approaches its end. There’s one scene that suddenly switches to color, and another where a character removes a part of their head to reveal circuitry beneath. Those weird elements don’t take over the film, but they certainly make it a more delirious experience. It helps, though, that it’s still grounded by real-feeling characters and an offbeat, low-key (low as in belly-on-the-ground low) sense of humor. I strongly suspect that the movie plays well with a crowd that’s onboard with it, so I strongly encourage anyone looking for something different to seek it out.

Grade: B