There are a lot of movie convergences going on in King Richard, all good. It’s a Will Smith movie, and, for the first time in a long time, it’s a good Will Smith performance. It’s a sports movie about two of the greatest athletes of all time, Venus and Serena (maybe the best ever) Williams. And its partially a period piece about race and class relations in the United States in the 1990s. Those wonderful potent ingredients result in a wonderful, well made movie about SOMETHING, without the guise of a horror villain or superhero…unless you consider Serena Williams one.
Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) are 2 of Richard (Will Smith) and “Brandy” (Oracene Price, played by Aunjanue Ellis) Williams’s 5 girls they are raising in Compton California in the 1990s. Richard has planned out all of their lives since before they were born, and he’s determined Venus and Serena are going to become the best tennis players in the world. Richard relentlessly pushes the girls to those and other goals, getting help along the way from trainers like Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn) and Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal).
The combination of family drama with sports movie allows King Richard more specificity and nuance than a movie in either genre can pull off on its own. Your traditional sports movie has a familiar formula of early struggles + lucky breakthrough + setback + big finale, with the times in between those 4 scenes usually boring filler. Not so here: those middle scenes are rich with establishing the Williams’s family dynamics, which allow the build to those 4 big sports movie moments to actually mean something. Venus’s setbacks for example are a direct result of her father’s strong bond with her, but potentially at the expense of her future career. From the family side, usually the results of a family bond or lesson are pretty insular to the family itself. Not so here, all the family dynamics manifesting inside the Williams household ooze out into the public with a Richard Williams outburst or positively with Venus’s domination of Junior Tennis at age 11. The sports/family story fusion reaps greater and greater results as King Richard builds to its climax. Plus, it’s just a delight to see an African-American family so actively joyous and pulling for one another a majority of the time.
And front and center in the story is Will Smith. It’s really been a rough go of it for Smith for a while now, seemingly unsure of where he wants his career to go. Well if he finds more roles like Richard Williams, we could be in for a great, upcoming run. Smith really inhabits Venus and Serena’s dad, filled with unwavering belief in his ability to make things happen for his kids. In addition, Smith gives Williams a deep well of distrust and resentment at the privileged, Caucasian rules built around tennis to keep people like his daughters out. The media painted Richard Williams like one of those deranged kids sports parents; King Richard lets Smith show that Richard Williams was much more complicated than that trite media framing. Aunjanue Ellis is wonderful in support as Brandy, as much of a contributor to her daughters’ successes as Richard was. Plus, props to Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton, who pull of looking like capable tennis players as kids which could not have been easy.
Many people like King Richard’s chances this Oscar season, which usually gives an air of pretension to a movie. However, this is a lovely change of pace for an Oscar movie, because there’s not really anything pretentious about it. And if that doesn’t sell the superhero fans on King Richard…think of this as Serena and Venus’s origin story, possibly setting us up for a sequel!