King Richard (2021)
dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2021 Warner Bros. Pictures
During one of the many scenes in King Richard in which Richard Williams is trying to convince someone, anyone, in the tennis world to coach his daughters, he includes in his pitch that he wrote a 73-page plan for Venus and Serena’s careers before they were even born. It strikes me that if the Williams sisters weren’t two of the greatest players to ever pick up a racket, if they had flamed out after a few years of middling success, we might look at King Richard in a very different light. We might be tempted to call Richard Williams’s relentlessness and determination by another name, child abuse.
But Venus and Serena are winners, so all is forgiven. The movie also takes care to demonstrate that Richard Williams is invested in and supportive of his daughters when they lose, too. On balance, King Richard is inspiring and delightful. The fantastic performances have a lot to do with that. The film is another tile in the mosaic of plucky Hollywood mythologizing that if you want something badly enough, you’ll get it. Remember as you watch it, though, that the only reason the movie is so inspiring is because the Williams sisters are the greatest to ever play the game.
King Richard is a tidy movie. It hits every basic beat you expect an underdog sports movie to hit. There’s adversity and struggle followed by determination and the beginning signs of success before a climactic test of will and talent as the grand finale. Like another soaring sports movie with an unexpected ending – think of a sport that’s fallen out of favor in modern times – how the characters react when things don’t go as planned is what gives the picture its true strength and inspiration.
It's clear that Richard Williams loves his daughters. He wants only the best for them, but he also wants only the best from them. Zach Baylin’s screenplay isn’t hesitant about complicating its hero. Williams is a vainglorious and shameless self-promoter. It’s telling that at one point in the movie, Richard says to Venus that, “this world ain’t never had no respect for Richard Williams, but they’re gon’ respect y’all.”
His motivations are slippery. It’s to be expected that a parent – especially one in a racially discriminated against group – would want the world to respect his child in a way he has never felt respected. The movie does an effective job of muddying the water, however. During several moments, we aren’t quite sure if his motives don’t have more to do with living vicariously through his children. One scene in particular, towards the end, pulls this into focus. More on that later.
My biggest reservation going into King Richard was the fact that the story features two of the greatest tennis players in history, but instead of these incredible women being the focus of the movie, it’s about their father. I’m delighted to say that I was mostly wrong. We get to know both Venus and Serena during King Richard.
The movie takes place roughly between 1990 and 1994, when Venus, at 14, made her professional tennis debut. We see the Williams sisters grow, and thrive, and sometimes chafe under the strict and demanding discipline of their father. Serena must deal with disappointment when she learns that only Venus will receive the sponsored training of a professional tennis coach.
The movie closely ties us to Venus’s psychological point-of-view during the climactic final match, her professional debut at the Bank of the West Classic in Oakland, California. As good as these moments are, though, we’re never in doubt as to who’s movie this is: Richard’s.
So, we see Richard dealing with the local neighborhood toughs who catcall and threaten his oldest step-daughter, Tunde, while Venus and Serena practice at the local, rundown city park tennis courts. We see Richard take the sidearm issued to him for his security guard job to seek revenge on these men after they brutally assault him. Luckily fate intervenes in the nick of time; like I said, it’s a very tidy movie. Ditto that sentiment when a few of those neighborhood troublemakers are magically won over after seeing Richard, Venus, and Serena practicing in the pouring rain.
This is Richard’s movie, so it’s a damn good thing that one of Hollywood’s most charismatic and likable actors fills the role. Most of the warmth and magic generated in King Richard is due to its phenomenal cast. Will Smith is charming as Richard Williams. From the few brief news clips included with the final credits, he’s also incredibly faithful to the mannerisms and demeanor of his real-life counterpart.
Through Smith’s public persona as the ultimate Mr. Congeniality, the actor’s presence alone makes us much more forgiving of Richard’s shortcomings. At one point, he attempts to abandon his kids at a convenience store after sending them in for some candy. He’s prepared to let them walk home because he doesn’t think they are expressing appropriate humility after Venus wins her first juniors tournament. Only Smith’s magnetic charm keeps us from turning against Richard in this moment.
Correction: It’s Will Smith’s magnetic charm and the brilliant performance of Aunjanue Ellis as Richard Williams’s wife, Brandy. Ellis’s Brandy will only put up with her husband’s eccentricities to a point. When Brandy looks at Richard and coldly tells him, “Don’t you ever leave my babies again,” Ellis had me reacting in the same way as when my own mother went into do-not-screw-with-me mode.
Ellis absolutely shines in the scene I teased earlier. Brandy confronts Richard about his hidden motives for pushing his daughters so hard, and his habit of walking away when things get too uncomfortable for him. I’m calling it the PB&J scene, because it takes place in the kitchen of the beautiful home that Rick Macci, Venus’s coach, has provided as part of the family’s move from Compton, California to Florida for her training.
Brandy is making PB&Js for the kids when she confronts Richard for making plans for Venus’s life without first consulting Venus. Ellis delivers Brandy’s righteous anger calmly but firmly. We don’t see her nearly as much as I would have liked, but she shines in the few powerful moments the movie gives her; Ellis is a perfect counterweight to everything Smith is doing as Richard.
The setting of the PB&J sequence brought to mind the British “kitchen sink realism” movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. Those films – a few notable examples are Look Back in Anger and This Sporting Life – focused on the problems of the working class and ditched the popular practice at the time of only presenting characters who were perfectly mannered pillars of society. Often, major conflicts between characters in these films would play out in the kitchen during a meal or its preparation, hence the name. King Richard feels like an extension of this legacy, and the PB&J scene works brilliantly because of Smith and Ellis’s raw performances in it.
Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton both turn in heartwarming work as Venus and Serena, respectively. It’s true that we don’t get to know the girls quite as well as I would have liked, but the movie doesn’t make them ciphers, either. They both have agency and part of the drama involves the girls navigating the demanding nature of their relationship with their father.
Jon Bernthal flirts with, but thankfully never quite crosses over into, camp with his going-for-broke performance as Venus’s coach, Rick Macci. Bernthal turns the hoagie mouth accent of native Ohioan Macci – made famous by Kate Winslet in 2021’s Mare of Easttown – up to eleven.
There are brief moments when I thought King Richard might wander into Ryan Murphy territory, where every performance is as big and loud as possible in order to create a gaudy – if usually fun and effective – camp sensibility. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green keeps things grounded in reality. The pathos and struggle of the Williams family, and Richard in particular, is Green’s primary focus, and he builds a movie around it that is ultimately satisfying. His use of the montage and other tidy movie tricks to boil the story down to its most inspirational core isn’t groundbreaking, but the human drama he captures in King Richard offers up a rewarding journey.
Why it got 3 stars:
- If you don’t dig any deeper than an inspirational story about overcoming obstacles and long odds, King Richard works fine. If you think about the implications of raising children to fulfill a purpose you’ve decided for them before they were born, things start to get a little tricky.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Ok, let’s address the elephant in the room. I wrote this review before the Oscar ceremony, on Sunday morning, but I put the final touches on it after the ceremony. I thought long and hard about altering or removing the paragraph that begins, “Through Smith’s public persona as the ultimate Mr. Congeniality…”
Smith has seemingly blown that persona to kingdom come with that one slap. I hate to think his reputation is shot after one ill-considered action (there are thousands of people rotting in prison as I type this that have been branded as untouchables because of one thing they did, in most cases, years and years ago).
People grow. People change.
I think Smith was wrong to do what he did, but I also understand exactly why he did it. It would have been much more effective if he had, like his wife, given Chris Rock a gigantic eye roll, then taken the advantage either during his acceptance speech or later (since he didn’t know in that moment if he would win) to rhetorically light Rock up over the shitty joke he made. But, as someone who doesn’t always do or say the right thing if I don’t have enough time to reflect first, I understand how easy it could have been for me to make the same mistake. His half-assed apology during his acceptance speech made things worse, in my mind. Saying that love justifies an act of violence is utterly toxic. And it was when he started invoking his God to justify what he had done that my eyes just turned to pinwheels.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I rented King Richard from Amazon in order to screen it. It became available to HBO Max subscribers (of which I am one) for free two days later. Sad trombone.