2022 Best Picture Review: King Richard
Richard Williams (Will Smith, left) pushes his daughters Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) in a cart filled with tennis balls. Smith is nominated for Best Actor at the 94th Academy Awards.
So, we’re back with more reviews of the Best Picture nominees, just like we did last year. This time, Tom writes about King Richard, the sorta-biopic of Richard Williams (Will Smith), the father of Venus Williams (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena Williams (Demi Singleton), directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green. It is currently available to rent or buy, though it will hopefully be available to stream on HBO Max again soon. I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, but just be aware.
“Don’t nothing come to a sleeper but a dream.”
The titular “King” Richard Williams is exhausting. He speaks a mile a minute, he tricks his kids into unsolicited life lessons, he interjects into training sessions by contradicting instructors, and he videotapes everything. This is a character who wrote pamphlets for his daughters’ entire careers before they’d even begun formal tennis training. It’s a character who, if you met him in real life, would drive you insane and make you want to pull your hair out.
And yet, the filmmakers and Will Smith make you root for him and, of course his daughters Venus and Serena (and his wife, Oracene “Brandy” Price, played by Aunjanue Ellis, who is nominated for a long-overdue Best Supporting Actress award this year as well).
Now, make no mistake, you’ve seen this movie before. The structure is fairly similar to any other biopic. Unless you live under a rock or somewhere deep in the metaverse, you know that Venus and Serena Williams become the greatest tennis players in the history of the game, so you know that by the end, you’re going to see at least one climactic tennis match, you’re going to see our protagonists overcome some sort of hardship, and you’re going to have a touching Hollywood moment where the friction resolves. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything there. Narratively, the movie is nothing unprecedented. It’s a nice, feel-good story. Entering with this expectation helped.
But it’s the camera work and acting that elevate King Richard to another level. The tennis scenes have the clean, glossy sheen that you would expect from a movie distributed by Warner Brothers that had the Williams sisters as consultants and Beyoncé signed on for an original song. It’s a stunningly filmed movie that works in those types of scenes, but probably makes some of the earlier, “grittier” scenes a bit too overproduced. But overall, it really works for what the movie is trying to get across. You’re not going to get a hard-hitting psychological thriller with this one; you’re going to get, as Saniyya Sidney stated, “a feel good movie that you’d watch every Thanksgiving.”
As for the acting, as the title would indicate, Will Smith is the focal point. He’s electric, and I spent days after watching the movie saying things in his accent like the way he says "VenusWilliams” as if it’s one word every time he addresses his daughter. While I’m not sure there was a moment in the movie where he fully disappeared into the role and I wasn’t thinking “that’s Will Smith with a funny accent,” he does a convincing enough job of showing the type of person that Venus and Serena believe their father is: a micromanager, flawed and unorthodox, a fast-talker, overbearing at times, but a loving and devoted father set on pushing his daughters (all five of them, not just Venus and Serena) through their hardships in Compton to pursue their dreams.
And while the film is titled King Richard, but Miss Oracene was driving the success of the Price-Williams children just as much, if not more than Richard. It’s sort of a trope to say that the unheralded mother was the rock in the family that held everything together, but tropes almost always come from somewhere real, and while I’ve noted that this isn’t the most originally written biopic, Oracene as the family’s rock draws straight from true events. In a 1999 piece on Richard by Sports Illustrated, she is described as balancing “Richard’s bombast with her strong faith … and clear-eyed judgment.” She once chided Richard for making inflammatory comments about one of Venus’s rival tennis players. And she instills a sense of calm and poise into her daughters. “There's no such thing as pressure,” she said. “As Black Americans, that's all we've ever had. It's life. So where's the pressure?” She added, “I teach my kids to live in reality: You're Black, you always have to work harder -- but you don't have to prove yourself to anybody. I don't expect you to, and I don't expect you to apologize. Ever.”
From Smith to Ellis to the child actors to the who’s who of character actors - Tony Goldwyn, Dylan McDermott, and the always-magnetic Jon Bernthal, clad in ridiculous '90s-style tennis outfits and a bushy mustache - everyone bought in. The actors saw the vision and knew their assignment, and they helped make the movie into a next-level biopic. For example, Saniyya Sidney is left-handed and had never played tennis before. She had to learn how to recreate Venus’s tennis stroke using her off-hand, which is wild because of how convincing she was. And there was clearly some sort of camaraderie on set: according to THR, Smith, who was reportedly paid up to $40 million for his role, handed out bonus checks to his co-stars from his own pocket because of Warner Brothers’ pivot to a dual theaters-HBO Max release. The movie was clearly something special to him, and you can tell.
Overall, King Richard is an extremely well-done biopic anchored by the performances of Smith and Ellis and buoyed by Bernthal and the charming child actors, the chemistry among the cast, and the sharpness of many of the scenes that bring tennis to life. It won’t blow your mind, but it’s a crowd pleaser and definitely worth the watch.
Rating: 7.5/10