From left: Demi Singleton as Serena, Will Smith as 'King Richard' and Saniyya Sidney as Venus
By Dominique Paul Noth
Released to film festivals in October and to the general public in November, King Richard should still be playing at movie theaters but has moved rather formidably to a variety of streaming services (usually for $19.99 rental), confounding expectations given its budget, its star draw in Will Smith and its bigtime investors.
It should on reputation still be doing blockbuster business because of both respectable reviews and a real-life storyline many of us remember, perhaps negatively though the results were positive. It is how one gruff African American father, Richard Williams – bossy, driven, endlessly talkative and protective of his children -- confounded expectations in the lily-white world of professional tennis.
Many of us knew the outlines from the 1980s – a determined hustling black father imposing strict regimens on all five daughters (three from his wife’s previous marriage, with suggestions that he had other families along the way), writing a detailed 85-page plan for his two daughter’s future when they were four and a half and cajoling and wheedling the tennis world into giving his glibness and young’uns center stage as an opportunity for Venus and Serena Williams – then pulling them from the heady world of juniors as too destructive of their characters.
Lo and behold he was right in his expectations, homegrown training and against-all-odds beliefs. They would become the best in the tennis world.
The movie focuses mainly on teenage Venus and it embellishes several lessons, such as how the father came close to losing his own cool over boys pursuing his teens and only by the grace of a drive-by shooting escaping the ghetto life he feared.
There is a tendency (probably strengthened here by Serena and Venus as co-producers) to add too much sugar into these truly moving minority tales of how a strong-willed family insisting on basic values can survive prejudice and privileged expectations to flip the world on its ear. These movies, factual and not, have found an audience – “Hidden Figures,” “The Blind Side” and “The Help” spring to mind. There is a tendency to simplify the lessons, the cheeriness of such families, the villainy of those standing against them. Here there is at least some effort to counter the sweetness. .
Smith plays the dad with careful physical restraint but dominance, a quite suitable naturalism, and an appealing but unshakable insistence on Richard’s way no matter how big the bucks are offered by Nike and the so-called tennis experts. It’s nice to see Smith, whose main box office oomph has been escapist films, prove his acting ability is not a fluke of personality.
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green keeps the movie well paced, the young cast as likable as kittens, the tennis action revealing in rapid cuts from closeups to bird’s eye as Richard prowls around the edges.
Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene
King Richard spends much of its time partly correcting the historical image the country had that this was the ultimate in controlling dads, suggesting that as crazy as his rules and manner seemed they worked – and largely because of the prejudice he had to constantly fight against.
But while Smith will get all the huzzahs, the best acting in the film belongs to Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene (Brandy) his wife – feisty, supportive and insisting on equality – a performance that deserves to be considered at awards time. It is her honesty as an angry truth-telling wife that keeps the film from slipping irretrievably into the sugary side.
Also impressive and constantly expressive as the young Venus is Saniyya Sidney, who can no longer be regarded as teenage flash in the pan. The rest of the supporting cast is both a physical match and quite capable. It’s a fine movie. Not a great movie. But a good story.
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About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.
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