For those of us who don’t watch a lot of women’s tennis, the sheer title of the movie about Serena and Venus Williams’s childhood now hitting theaters (King Richard, released November 19th), might provoke a frown or two. Who is Richard, and how did a male get the lead role in a movie about the two greatest women’s tennis players in modern history? At best, it feels like an attempt to get a male audience to come to a film that would otherwise be perceived as feminist. At worst, it feels like a man getting attention for women’s success. Indeed, the film has received lots of criticism on Twitter in recent weeks for its focus on Richard, Venus and Serena’s father, instead of the girls themselves. What these commenters forget is that the women were both interviewed during the process of making this film, and both approved of its script. King Richard is a nonfiction biopic; if the movie contains misogyny, that’s because their childhoods did, too.
Once the film begins rolling, its title begins to make a little bit more sense. Venus and Serena’s rise to tennis stardom, the movie exposes, wasn’t the fairytale that most of us were hoping for. It was instead the common but nevertheless cold-blooded narrative of children laboring to meet their parent’s too-high expectations.
Long before Venus and Serena were born, Richard, a hustler recuperating from a messy divorce and various failed businesses, read about the cash prizes that professional tennis athletes were winning back in the seventies, and he hatched a plan: his children were going to become tennis stars. Outlined on a 78-page document, this plan, he said, would bring his daughters the respect that he never experienced as a child growing up in the deep south, in the constant crosshairs of the local KKK. Sure enough, in 1980 and 1981, Richard’s new wife Oracene gave birth to back-to-back girls, and Richard’s plan had begun.
The film spans about a half-decade, from when Venus is ten to when she’s fourteen. In this period, Richard finds her a professional coach, registers her for a series of tournaments in the suburbs, moves the household to Florida to get her free training, and watches her compete in her first-ever professional match, which she loses, against Arantxa Sánchez Vicario. Venus and Serena are not his daughters; they are merely his lab rats, and he’s committed to testing them as much as he can. Stubbornly sticking to his 78-page plan, Richard ignores the wishes of both Venus’s coaches and his own daughter. His common refrain of keep a wide stance, often shouted over the conflicting advice from coaches he’s hired that Venus and Serena should narrow their stances, irritates us to the point that we want to shout back. While of course we know that Richard’s plan is going to be vindicated in the end, and that Venus and Serena will popularize the wide stance for the rest of the sport, his utter disregard for the opinions of other characters, characters we develop compassion for, still bites.
In some scenes Richard is what we imagine the perfect dad to be: he takes the girls out for hamburgers at a local restaurant, defends his eldest daughter Yetunde from a gangster flirting with her during tennis practice, and cancels a tennis lesson to take the girls to an amusement park when he senses that Venus is getting tired of her training. In other scenes, he’s so laser-focused on their tennis skills that he’s willing to sever his relationship with them as their father to become a fiercer, more demanding coach. The question of whether we’re witnessing excessive tiger parenting or downright child abuse is one we grapple with like Richard’s broken tennis racquet, which he can never find the extra savings to repair.
King Richard is a fitting nickname for the protagonist of this movie: like a king, we are expected to simultaneously worship him for what he does for his children and resent the power he’s acquired through doing so. One cannot help but recall Shapespeare’s King Richard III, in which a man kills all his relatives and political enemies in order to become king. Richard is much less violent, but no less ambitious.
Although the audience detects that something is wrong with Richard’s parenting, the film is vague, on purpose, about whether or not the sisters themselves want to continue following their dad’s plan or not. We rapidly switch back and forth between wanting Venus to win her matches and sign a multi-million dollar shoe contract, and then wanting her to lose, quit, and go back to having a regular childhood. We don’t know what to root for, because rooting for either of the girls means rooting for the 78-page plan, which means rooting for Richard. And we can’t bear to see his proud smirk one more time.
In one pivotal scene, Richard, refusing to let the weather interrupt their routine tennis practice, is hitting Venus and Serena practice backhands in the rain. The downpouring water veils over Venus and Serena’s faces; we can’t read their expressions. It’s a perfect metaphor, the girls blindly obeying their father’s instructions in order to get better at a sport he picked for them. When, coming back home from that same very practice, Richard finds a police cruiser parked out in front of the house and detectives talking to his wife inside because a neighbor reported them for child abuse, we don’t know what to think. Is Richard, in wanting his children to have a brighter future than he did, a criminal?
It’s a long movie (two hours and fourteen minutes, to be precise) but feels much shorter. The acting is magical, the costumes are simple but reminiscent of the era, and the all-white extras looming in the background at Venus’s tournaments give us the sense of alienation that the Williams family must have felt while watching their girls compete. As someone who doesn’t like tennis that much, I found the tennis scenes a little bit too detailed (Was it really necessary to show us Venus’s three warm-up bounces before every serve, including the faults? Seriously?), but that, obviously, is my personal opinion.
Venus and Serena’s life paths, from the courts littered with garbage in their local Compton park to the world’s finest tennis stadiums, is as cliche as a movie could get. King Richard knows this, and it never tries to deceive us that there won’t be a happy ending to Venus and Serena’s careers. Instead, the film does as much as it can to keep the plot entertaining while it can, with minor victories and losses absorbing our attention even though we know what the future holds for the Williams sisters. Seeing the girls through Richard’s hypercritical but unconditionally proud eyes, we notice everything that they do correct and incorrect, from their perfect grades to the hamburgers they order poolside at a tennis club, oblivious to who would have to purchase them.
However, there are also consequences to watching Venus and Serena’s childhoods through Richard’s eyes. We miss a lot of the sub-plots that are happening in the background of Venus’s tennis games, like the marital friction between Richard and Oracene (they would break up in 2002) or the uncomfortable chemistry between Venus and Serena when Richard picked Venus, not Serena, to get free lessons with a private coach, and Serena begins retreating into Venus’s shadow. Since Venus is his more talented daughter and the one likelier to fulfill his plan, she consumes all of his attention, and, therefore, the audience’s too. Also omitted from the film is the historical context in which the racial hierarchies in the movie are occuring. Watching the news one evening, Richard and Oracene come across clips of the Rodney King beating and murmur about it under their breaths, but they never talk to the girls about it, or the subsequent Watts riots that their neighborhood would have inevitably been involved in. Maybe this is an attempt to hide Venus and Serena from the graphic violence being inflicted on their community for as long as they can, for the sake of their mental health. Or maybe, less innocently, it is Richard not wanting the girls to think about racial oppression, because those thoughts would distract them from their volley drills. Richard was without a doubt an anti-racist, but whether he wanted his girls to inherit that from him is a less simple question.
In another pivotal moment of the movie (there are plenty), Venus wins a match at a youth tournament and is bragging about it with her older sisters on the drive home. As punishment for bragging, Richard sits the family down on the couch and forces them to watch Cinderella, telling them that the life lesson from the classic movie is to be humble. No matter how much the prince might love you, you are still from the ghetto (word Richard uses cordially), and one slip-up is enough to put your entire future in danger. Nothing is guaranteed.
Following Richard’s instructions, the movie is indeed humble. It could have shown Venus and Serena winning Wimbledon, or appearing on the front cover of the same tennis magazines that Richard studied while training them, or donating millions of dollars back to children from impoverished backgrounds. Instead, the final scene shows Venus in tears walking out of a locker room after losing in the first big match of her life. As the credits fade, we learn that she signed a $12 million shoe contract with Reebok, but that’s it. There is no big a-ha moment of redemption for Richard; he is as consistent in his future-oriented optimism as he is about the red tennis outfit he wears all movie long.
At his best, Richard was a publicist for his daughters. He gave out fliers to private tennis coaches with their statistics, recorded their practices for future documentaries about them, scheduled interviews, and more. He was worried about their image in the media, which he knew, in essence, was a mirror image of his own. Now that Venus and Serena, come 2021, have proven themselves as both professional athletes and celebrities, King Richard is able to exhale a little bit from those worries. Forgetting about Richard’s image, the movie seeks to delete the tapes that Richard collected of Venus and Serena’s childhood practices and instead give the public a more realistic depiction of their success, one that is more vulnerable and, I think, more valuable.
Commenti