King Richard
Starring Will Smith , Aunjanue Ellis, Saniyya Sidney, Demi Singleton, Tony Goldwyn, and Jon Bernthal
Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green
Rating: ***
Ostensibly a bio-pic on the legendary Williams sisters of tennis, this is actually a film about their Dad, a cranky aging bully who drives his daughters around the bend convinced they are born to rule the tennis field.
Richard Williams was right. But what if he was not? What if Aamir Khan in Dangal was pushing his daughters into wrestling to satisfy his own ego?
At what point in one’s parental duties does push come to shove?This is the larger question that this bio-pic tracing the phenomenal rise to world championship of the Williams sisters, addresses.And this is where this engrossing real-life film acquires an extra dimension.
The exploration of the arching relationship between child and parent,and in this case between protégée and mentor, is explored with surprising meticulousness.
I say, surprising , because this is a palpably massy production, aimed at the maximum viewership.If King Richard was a Bollywood production there would be songs. Sassy and insouciant, King Richard, as the title suggests, portrays the Williams’ sisters Venus and Serena’s father as a despotic doer.
As Will Smith, in the role and performance of his lifetime, keeps saying, he knows that both the sisters are born champ material. From that moment of realization he doesn’t spare his daughters a single moment for recreational activities such as boys. Conveniently the neighbourhood boys are shown as predatory layabouts with nothing to do except ogle at girls who probably have higher aims in life, aspirations that are largely lacking in a community that has risen up the social scale the hard way.
While the two actresses playing Venus and Serena ,Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton, are pick-perfect, this is Will Smith’s show all the way: make no mistake about that.Smith is so brilliant in portraying an indefatigable vicarious achiever, he not only knocks the ball out of the court he also makes the court his stage for a grandslam performance.
A bully and an insufferably arrogant father, Smith’s Richard Williams is borderline megalomaniac. Somewhere in the self-serving daughters-pushing achiever , there is also a concerned father who dreams big for his daughters.
In some ways Will Smith reminded me of Aamir Khan in Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal .Of course Smith’s performance is far superior to Khan’s. Watch him in the lengthy sequence where he tells his daughter Venus about the ravages of racism that he faced as a child when his father left him unprotected during a racial attack. Smith’s face is filled with pain and determination. He will see his daughters conquer the world, no matter what it takes.
Where the film flounders is in delineating Richard’s relationship with his wife,played well by
Aunjanue Ellis. The husband and wife’s big confrontation sequence is so clumsily written, going from recrimination to reconciliation with no connecting dots, that I ended up wondering what was the need to show the fissures in the marriage when the entire focus of the plot is to accentuate the father’s determination to see his daughter’s at the summit.
King Richard is not without its quota of flaws. The Daddy-knows-best mantra that runs through the narrative must have taken its toll on Venus and Serena’s self-worth. We always see the girls as obedient except once when Venus insists on a career decision suggested by her coach, played brilliantly by Jon Bernthal.Otherwise,Will Smith enjoys playing the bossy daddy as much as we enjoy watching him play lord of the offsprings.
King Richard is as much an ego trip for Richard Williams as it is for the actor who plays him. Will Smith is Oscar-worthy in his portrayal of a man who would be king in his daughters’ empire. But what if he had been wrong?
