Movie portrayals of academia are invariably cringeworthy. Most movies usually get away with that as long as academia is not the main character, which it rarely is.
The Queen's Gambit achieves the near-impossible by conveying the spirit of academia, through the metaphor of chess. Anya Taylor-Joy's genius is so intense that it not only makes one feel what it is like to be a woman, a chess player, or a chic dress but also makes one desire to be all of those things.
It is the job of an artist to make the impossible seem effortless, to invent worlds, to entertain. The creators of the first four episodes of season 5 don't even try; they have surrendered to the reality show that the year 2020 has become. Why watch a knock-off if one can (indeed, one must) live the real thing? The creators should have skipped the year. They still can; the four episodes are unmemorable enough to be rebooted once the formidable team of writers can devote their undivided attention to the show again.
Bill Murray's Felix, who---thankfully---gets the lines, the suits, and the personality, is surrounded---inexplicably---by stick figures of characters who do not belong in a movie, certainly not in the same one. Mr. Murray does his best to lift other characters from their catatonic state, but the script has other plans. Laura spends her days trying to connect with her creative self in an overpriced building invariably shot from an awkward angle, while her husband, Dean, is busy losing himself trying to excel at a generic job in a generic city only to come back home to a generic family life that he would have long sought refuge from in therapy had the script not instructed him to feel---rather unpersuasively---otherwise. Laura and Dean marry, work, and New York because the New York Times has told them so. Felix lives.
Cinematography and acting (except for Murray's) pale in comparison with what one has come to expect from a random episode of a good television series.
The book's thesis is that Homo œconomicus placed in the right strategic environment is the most trustworthy of men. The thesis is unashamedly repeated over and over again, for the benefit of those who find comfort in repetition. Reckless repetition does not render this thesis wrong.
