‘King Richard’ Had Blockbuster Potential

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 big-time 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 tells 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 daughters’ future when they were four and a half years old 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 junior tennis 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 tales of how a strong-willed minority 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 and 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 and the tennis action revealing in rapid cuts from closeups to bird’s eye as Richard prowls around the edges.

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 battle.