King Richard
SCREENPLAY: B
We enter the Williams’s story at a point where Venus and Serena are old enough to demonstrate their supreme talent. Richard’s plan (written before birth!, as we’re told multiple times) is working. The movie portrays the period of the family’s life where the following question must be answered: Now that the girls have developed into excellent tennis players, can we get to the finish line and turn them into stars? We know the answer: the Williams sisters transform the game of tennis forever.
It’s difficult to make this kind of movie - how do you make it exciting or thrilling when we already know how the story ends? The best job of a movie doing this that I can think of is Apollo 13. We know the astronauts survive, but we’re on the edge of our seat the entire trip.
King Richard is smart enough to not focus the film’s tension around the “Will they or won’t they?” question. It doesn’t want to be exciting or thrilling. It aims its focus instead on the “how.” Like Searching for Bobby Fischer (director Reinaldo Marcus Green has cited it as an inspiration), much of the tension revolves around opposing ideas of what the best path to a child’s success is. For all the notoriety and fame revolving around this family, these decisions were not widely known or shared.
The film also focuses more on the family than the tennis. They were a paparazzi sensation in the day, but like anyone we get to know through the media, we never actually knew them. That’s not to say we know them now after watching King Richard, but we’ve got a fuller, more sympathetic picture.
ACTING: A
Will Smith’s performance will be the talk throughout awards season. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. You don’t see movie star-Will Smith lying beneath the gruff and determined Richard Williams. His megawatt charm hits us only in quick flashes, like an overhead smash. He serves up these moments when he punctuates one of his tough lessons for the girls with a hug or a bad dad joke. Or when he can’t help but give the white gatekeepers grief, knowing he’s the actual gatekeeper to the two winning lottery tickets they all covet.
Aunjaune Ellis does what few people can. She goes toe to toe with one of the most charming movie stars in history and inspires us to have her back instead of his. The movie’s success largely leans on her performance. If she’s not a credible force, Richard becomes an authoritative bully. She not only stands up to him when he’s overplayed his hand, she wrings every drop of force from her few words. As Richard rails in his vain, performative tirade against the police, it’s Brandy who aims her words with precision at the correct target, with just the appropriate amount of venom.
Everyone’s performance orbits the two Williams girls. Their characters may lack agency, but their performances provide the pivotal center of the film. The girls radiate joy and laughter, adorned with the physical abilities that make you really believe they could grow up to dominate the world. Venus stands up against her father in one of the best scenes of the film, and Saniyya Sidney aces it. It’s a beautiful portrait of a young woman taking her first steps toward owning her life.
Also, Jon Bernthal’s performance is an absolute gift from heaven.
CRAFT: B
You truly feel that we’re in the early 90s. The clothes are accurate, if not always stylin’. The homes feel like the 90s. And the van! The Junior tournaments are a big deal, but they still have an unglammed innocence surrounding them that youth sports enjoyed in those days. And in one of my favorite movie things, they show how accurately they recreated everything by showing photos from back in the day during the ending credits. It’s a humble brag, and in general I detest humble brags. But I love, love, love this type of humble brag.
The tennis matches look great. One of my favorite things about watching tennis is seeing the angles they need to hit in order to win the point. The baseline shots let you see that really well.
Also, The Gambler is a golden choice for the RV trip.
TALKING ‘BOUT RACE (Elective Class): A-
The film does a great job addressing the racial elephant in the room. Or more accurately, the racial elephant at the country club sipping a daiquiri, lounging poolside. Richard says he smells blood in the water when he’s invited to an exclusive country club to meet with a potential agent. He ain’t wrong. These bloodthirsty agents either can’t imagine Richard’s smart enough to realize it’s his blood they’re circling, or they believe he’s too poor to care. But Richard is in a unique position and realizes the worth of himself and his family. He realizes what’s happening - that his family is about to be eaten alive for a sizable, yet incredibly unfair, amount of money (the $100,000 sounds like a lot until you realize the sisters will go on to win $136 MILLION in prize money alone before any endorsements are tallied up).
He shoos the girls out of the club, telling them to immediately drop the food they’re eating. The girls (both the sisters and the new white friends they’ve made) are confused at the sudden departure. Race hasn’t become an issue for them yet because they’re still kids. Race isn’t an issue for the vast majority of white audiences who will be watching this film either, so some may share the girls’ confusion. I hope that a white audience learns enough about the Williams’s lives in the first 30 minutes of the film to realize that Richard’s decision in this scene is completely appropriate. It’s one small example in a large list of Black talent and work being exploited.
FINAL COMMENTS:
I love the constant confirmation and esteem Richard uses to lift up his girls. The media has never spotlighted this aspect of the family as much as it should have.
But you might walk away from this movie believing that hard work and belief is all you need to achieve success. I’ve lived long enough to know that’s not true. True, you can’t succeed without belief and hard work. But working hard and believing in yourself does not guarantee you’ll be successful. There’s more to the equation. You need something else, and that something else is different for everybody. Richard’s plan feels like it’s that “something else” in this story, but we never learn a whole lot about it. We just hear him mention it over and over again. I was left wanting to know more.
But perhaps that’s intentional. Maybe Green wants the main focus of this film to be on the family itself. Yes, the family is striving for success on the tennis court. But from watching this film, it seems like success is measured more by how they work as a family than anything else. The external rewards aren’t as valuable as the internal rewards that the family shares: belief in each other, survival against long odds, and bursting love.
And maybe that’s the “something else” I’m looking for.