11/9/2022 0 Comments Like mike vhs![]() Of course, Richard’s decisions about doing what’s best for his daughters never actually seem to involve his daughters, or Oracene, despite the fact that she appears to have been just as instrumental in helping the girls develop their skills. So he changes coaches - to Florida-based Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal, doing a perfect impression of just about every other adult I met in the 1980s), whom he hopes will train Venus without the immediate promise of competitive glory. Despite Venus’s astounding success in juniors, Richard becomes convinced that the relentless grind of the circuit will psychologically ruin his daughter. Richard loves to talk about his aforementioned plan as an iron-clad thing, but there seems to be more improvisation and backpedaling than he lets on. Soon, she’s destroying any and all opponents, leaving her young rivals and their parents angry, humiliated, and questioning their decision to play this sport in the first place. Cohen tells Richard that to get noticed, Venus needs to participate in junior tournaments. (He can’t teach both kids, however, so Serena - who would, perhaps ironically, go on to become an even bigger tennis champion - has to stay home and continue lessons with her mom, Oracene, played by Aunjanue Ellis.)ĭirected by Reinaldo Marcus Green, King Richard bounces along briskly through its somewhat predictable plot points. Sure enough, within a few minutes, Cohen has taken on Venus as a student for free. Wandering into the middle of a practice match between Pete Sampras and John McEnroe, overseen by legendary coach Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), Richard insists that the bewildered Cohen watch his daughters play. And that’s what I did with tennis, with the girls.” That goes beyond just teaching them skills, however it also involves breaking into the circuit of big-time trainers and clubs, a world in which a Black family from Compton is a rather rare sight. “How it works, how the best peoples in the world do it. “When I’m interested in a thing, I learn it,” Richard tells us. Indeed, it’s all part of his so-called plan, an elaborate, preordained trajectory of how Venus and Serena’s lives and careers will develop. When we first meet Richard, he’s already well aware that Venus and Serena (Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton) are enormous talents. It’s as if he’s absorbed a lifetime of hurt and hate so that his kids wouldn’t have to. “We was too busy running from the Klan.” We don’t actually see his past - the film isn’t really a biopic - but we feel it, in the hunched posture, gravelly determination, and oddly deferential hard-headedness with which Will Smith plays him. “Where I grew up, Louisiana, Cedar Grove, tennis was not a game peoples played,” he tells us in the film’s opening narration. ![]() Richard was born and raised in the segregated South, and his journey was a dramatic one. ![]() But oblique approaches to well-known tales can have their own value, and it makes some sense here - as the film is less about the father and more about a fraught but loving family relationship at a pivotal time in all their lives. Some will look at King Richard and wonder why anyone would want to make a movie about Richard Williams, father to tennis gods Venus and Serena, when his superstar daughters’ stories are right there and more momentous. ![]()
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