King Richard
Reinaldo Marcus Green (2021)
In Compton, California, in the early 1990s, Richard Williams (Will Smith) works night shifts as a security guard. His day job is tennis coach to his two pre-teen daughters, Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton), driving them to the local public courts in his battered red-and-white Volkswagen minibus. Before the girls were even born, Richard prepared a plan for them to be tennis champions. He pursues his unreasonable ambitions for them non-stop. His wife Brandy (Aunjanue Ellis), as well as helping with the tennis lessons, is a nurse, on day shifts, and a homemaker – for Richard, Venus, Serena and Brandy’s three older daughters from her first marriage (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew, Danielle Lawson and Layla Crawford). Richard sends round promotional material – videotapes, brochures – in the hope of attracting the interest of a professional coach for Venus and Serena. He’s getting nowhere until the day he presents himself and them to Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), just as he’s completing a practice session with John McEnroe (Christopher Wallinger) and Pete Sampras (Chase Del Rey). Cohen agrees to the Williams sisters hitting a few shots in the presence of these legends of the men’s game and is impressed by what he sees. Richard can’t afford the coaching fees; Cohen agrees to give free lessons but to only one of the girls. Venus, chaperoned by Richard, becomes his pupil while Brandy continues to coach Serena. Just about anyone who settles down to watch King Richard will already know, more or less, what happened next.
That isn’t, however, the fundamental problem with Reinaldo Marcus Green’s engaging, well acted film. The trouble is, rather, that once we’ve got the picture of Richard’s grand design and strategy for translating it into reality, King Richard seems to play the same scene repeatedly – since we get that picture pretty soon, Green’s long (145-minute) movie feels seriously overlong. Richard, who always knows best, is fearlessly frank and undiplomatic. He butts in on Cohen’s training sessions and, later, on his daughters’ rare media interviews. He insists that Venus, once she’s started winning junior tournaments, and Serena, once she too is taking part in them, won’t join the junior circuit that is the traditional passport to the senior tour and professional success. This causes a split with Paul Cohen and is a source of continuing tension with the girls’ new coach, Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal) in Florida, where the Williams family relocates. Richard is – or feels – vindicated when eighteen-year-old Jennifer Capriati (Jessica Wacnik), Macci’s star pupil, suffers premature burnout and is arrested for possession of marijuana. In a meeting at a country club, Richard tells a posse of high-profile agents where they can stick their lucrative offers. And so on (and on) …
In theory, this is all fair enough: of course the film, with a screenplay by Zach Baylin, is concerned principally with its title character rather than his illustrious daughters (who are among King Richard’s executive producers). Even though their game-changing achievements are reduced to summary text and video clips as part of the closing titles, the main narrative does include occasional match sequences that are well enough done – you don’t feel starved of sporting action. But you do want to know more of what the Williams sisters think about their father’s protective control. It’s these two prodigies who are developing – as players and surely also as personalities – in ways that Richard doesn’t. That lack of change means that the focus on him makes you feel, increasingly, that he’s blocking the view of a more remarkable story – the story that he is causing to happen.
Green and Baylin handle the racial aspect well. It isn’t overstressed at the junior tennis events – we can see, without needing to be told, that Venus and Serena are the only African Americans in a set-up dominated by white kids who are often bad losers – and whose pushy parents remind you that Richard Williams is pushy too, though extraordinarily so. His contempt for the agents at the country club is intensified by how ineptly they fail to conceal their racist views – the scene is effective, thanks to his reacting with derisive wit rather than earnest outrage. Even better, though, are scenes – I wish there had been more of them – that use a domestic setting to illustrate Richard’s articles of faith. When a hostile neighbour complains to the police that the Williams girls are being maltreated by their parents, Richard and Brandy are understandably infuriated by police officers’ questions about ‘overworking’ their daughters and threats to involve child protection services: it’s a crucial part of Richard’s master plan that Venus and Serena, like their three half-sisters, do well academically as well as on the tennis court. In another scene, the Williamses all watch Walt Disney’s Cinderella on TV: it seems like relaxed family time together until Richard asks each of the girls to sum up the moral of the story. One of his stepdaughters makes a humorous reply that gets her sent to her room. The takeaway from Cinderella, in Richard’s mind, is that the heroine always remains dignified and humble, even when she gets her prince. Richard sees this as a lesson to Venus in particular; she has just displeased her father by crowing about her demolition of a tennis opponent.
Brandy shares her husband’s determination that all their girls will be achievers, in the first place to keep them away from the dangers of Compton street life. Early scenes show Richard on the receiving end of a gang that hangs around the local courts and goads this middle-aged man in tennis gear. If he retaliates verbally, they assault him physically – on one occasion, when the gang has been hitting on his underage daughter. These exchanges build to an episode that, in the context of King Richard as a whole, is anomalous but which does its job in conveying the real threat of violence in the neighbourhood. After getting beaten up by the gang, Richard buys a shotgun and goes to seek them out. Just as he’s aiming the weapon in their direction, a shot is fired from another gun, killing one of the gang instantly. Richard gets away fast. I gather from post-film online reading that this is a melodramatically distorted version of an incident that Richard Williams records in his memoir[1]. It’s worth noting, too, that the scene might seem less incongruous if the film wasn’t otherwise so sketchy about its protagonist’s shady youth. Williams’ memoir also acknowledges that working in ‘the security business was a natural for someone who knew as much about stealing as I did’.
Despite the script’s limited, respectful conception of Richard Williams (the royal handle in the title isn’t all that ironic), Will Smith brings him to life very successfully. By making Richard’s intransigence both admirable and exasperating, Smith creates a good sense of how this paterfamilias is an embarrassment, as well as a hero, to his wife and daughters. An upside of Green and Baylin’s deference is that it limits Will Smith’s scope for showoff tirades, encourages him towards a subtler, richer characterisation, and gives more impact to the outbursts when they do occasionally happen. Aunjanue Ellis is a fine partner to Smith. In her early scenes, it’s overly obvious that Brandy feels compelled to keep her feelings to herself. Green tends to hold the camera on Ellis for longer than necessary, with the result that her acting appears a shade too deliberate. Her portrait accumulates power, though: Aunjanue Ellis, who is always expressive, is quite terrific in a big face-off between Brandy and Richard (who divorced in 2002).
Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton do well, even though their roles are underwritten. They have a good likeness to the teenage Williams sisters. Even better, Sidney and Singleton are able to anticipate something of the essential presence – or, at least, court presence – of the women that Venus and Serena grew into. I must confess to being grateful that the timeframe of King Richard – the action ends in late 1994 – means more screen time for the vivacious Venus than for her younger sister. (In spite of an unprecedentedly successful career, Serena has continued to give the impression that the world’s against her, seeming to labour under the astonishing misapprehension that she’s the underdog.) Tony Goldwyn has a thankless task in his opening scene – introducing Venus and Serena to McEnroe and Sampras brings to mind that hello-Stalin-I’m-Trotsky-meet-Lenin bit in Nicholas and Alexandra – but Goldwyn goes on to give a decent performance, as does Jon Bernthal as Rick Macci. Kris Bowers’s score is standard issue for an inspirational Hollywood story but at least it’s innocuous – and at least this inspirational story is one you know to be essentially true.
25 November 2021
[1] According to the History vs Hollywood website, Williams did obtain a gun but ‘couldn’t find any of the gang members and decided to return home. On the way, he saw police cars and an ambulance blocking traffic. He parked his VW Bus to try and see what had happened. It was then that he saw that one of the gang members who had beat him was lying dead in the street. His friends and family had gathered around his body. As Richard observed their grief, he realized he never wanted to induce that type of pain. He promised himself he would never bring the shotgun with him again’.