****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!! THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER FREE!!!****
My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This is a predictable yet pleasant enough bio-pic that isn’t great but is a benign, family friendly, moderately entertaining movie that should have enough broad-based appeal for people of different stripes to watch together over the holidays.
As neither a fan of the Williams sisters nor of Will Smith, I expected to dislike King Richard, the new bio-pic starring Smith as Richard Williams, the father of tennis prodigies Venus and Serena Williams, who aided his daughters as they navigated the violence of gang-infested Compton, California and the entitlement of the lily-white tennis world.
I assumed King Richard, executive produced by the Williams sisters, would sing the same tune that Venus and Serena and their fans often croon, namely crying racism over the most banal of critiques and shamelessly playing the victim card whenever possible.
But then I watched the movie and was pleasantly surprised by the appeal of its broad-based message and how moderately enjoyable I found it to be.
To be clear, King Richard, currently in theatres and streaming on HBO Max, is not a great movie or artistic achievement. It’s a formulaic, relentlessly middlebrow, crowd-pleasing sports movie/bio-pic that is devoid of any true suspense or tension as we all know how the story turns out, with Richard crowned the king of the sports dads as Venus and Serena win 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them.
The sports movie/bio-pic genre almost always demands that the rough edges of its characters be smoothed away in order to make the simplistic story go down smoother with audiences, and King Richard is no exception.
In real life Richard Williams is a much more complicated man than the hagiography of King Richard would ever explore. For instance, Richard has always been a force of nature when it comes to protecting his daughters and advancing their careers, but he’s also a philanderer who has fathered children with other women and is prone to levels of self-aggrandizement and egotism that would make Barnum and Bailey blush.
But with all that said, the most compelling thing about King Richard is that it’s an all-American story about a dedicated working-class guy, Richard Williams, who dreamed up his daughter’s tennis dominance even before they were born, wrote it out in a 78-page manifesto, and then went out and moved heaven and earth to make it happen.
Richard was driven, maniacal and controlling when it came to his daughters, and pushed them extremely hard, and despite, or maybe even because of, their race they became ridiculously successful and wealthy, and unlike say Tiger Woods, they did so without becoming self-destructive.
That’s an incredible story, Shakespearean in its family dynamics and emotional power, and while King Richard is a better story than it is a movie, that story is powerful enough to make the movie worth watching.
As it is in nearly everything these days, the specter of racism is certainly present in King Richard, but considering the hyper-sensitive, victimhood celebrating, grievance culture in which we live, it is never egregiously heavy-handed.
In fact, one of the more fascinating revelations in the film is that the Williams family had as many obstacles to overcome in their black community of Compton in the form of violence, jealousy and negativity, as they did in the parochial, white dominated infrastructure of the tennis world.
When the notion of racism does bubble to the surface, it does so in ways that aren’t so black and white. For example, there’s a scene smack dab in the middle of the movie where Richard becomes incensed when a white agent who is trying to sign Venus Williams says that what Richard has accomplished with his daughters is “incredible”.
An offended Richard cuts through the niceties of this business meeting and rants at the agent that the only reason he used the word “incredible” is because of Richard’s race. When the agent protests this charge, Richard defiantly farts and indignantly walks away.
What is so striking about this scene is that literally the only reason there’s a movie about Richard Williams’ “incredible” accomplishment is because he and his daughters are black. This is why we aren’t watching a bio-pic about Martina Navratilova’s father, or Chris Evert’s father, or Roger Federer’s father. Richard Williams has built an entire brand and persona around he and his daughters overcoming the supposed limitations imposed on them because of their race, and King Richard is proof of that.
This scene feels insightful, even if unintentionally so, as it perfectly sums up the current minefield of racial dialogue, where no matter what a white person says, it’s twisted into being perceived as racist.
As for Will Smith, I’ve always found him to be one of the more grating entities in entertainment. His acting, just like his insipidly embarrassing music, is always manipulative and manufactured, as is his persona.
Thankfully, in King Richard, Will Smith doesn’t so much make his cheesiness disappear as he does mute it. His performance isn’t transcendent or even all that good, but thankfully it isn’t distracting. For his middling efforts I’m sure he’ll be rewarded with an Academy Award come Oscar time.
Smith is working over time for an Oscar this time around. To coincide with the release of this Oscar-bait movie, he has released his autobiography so that he can be out working the Oscar circuit under teh guise of pushing his book.
The contents of the book, from what I can gather from news reports, is part of his Oscar push as well.
Apparently in the book, Smith talks about how he was such a committed Method actor early in his career that it messed with his marriage. Smith claims that he never broke character even off-set while working on his 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation, so much so that he fell in love with Stockard Channing, his co-star who is 24 years his senior.
To be clear, Smith doesn’t say he had an affair with Channing, only that he fell in love with her because he was so committed to his craft. Channing has basically responded by saying “that’s nice”.
What makes this story so ridiculous and incredulous, and so predictably manufactured and contrived, is that Will Smith was such a committed Method Actor while filming Six Degrees of Separation, that he quite famously refused to kiss a man on screen despite his character being gay. This was well reported at the time but Smith is pretending like it didn’t happen. It did, and part of why it did is that Denzel Washington was the one who advised Smith not to kiss a man on-screen.
I’m sorry, but if you’re a committed “Method Actor” (the actual definition of which has been so distorted and contorted by public mis-perception as to be useless, particularly from a acting teacher point of view) and yet you won’t do something on-screen because it will damage “your brand”, then you aren’t an actor, your a celebrity. Will Smith is now, and always has been, a celebrity, not an actor or artist.
Obviously, anyone who has ever seen Will Smith act knows he isn’t committed to his craft or art or anything of the sort, but only to his ego, his image and his career. Further proof of this is his “music” career, where he churned some of the most fucking horrendous and embarrassingly awful music in the history of rap with the cornball cheesiness that was “Parents Just Don’t Understand”.
The goal for Will Smith as a rapper and as an actor is to be famous, not to be an artist. Unfortunately, he’ll probably win an Oscar this year for simply not being as awful as he usually is…what can you do?
As for King Richard, while isn’t a great film, it is an inspiring one. Hopefully audiences learn the proper lesson of the value of hard work, self-discipline and familial love from the movie, as opposed to it inspiring a cavalcade of parent/coaches to try and turn their poor kids into lottery tickets through sports.
Ultimately, the best thing about King Richard is that it’s a benign, mildly entertaining, family friendly movie that people of varying philosophical dispositions and artistic tastes gathering together for the holidays can watch without having it spark arguments. That’s no small feat and something for which to be thankful in these polarizing times.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
