Advantage Williams: father, daughters and a shopping cart full of balls
In the 1980s, Compton, a southwestern Los Angeles suburb, was practically synonymous with drug and gang warfare. The godfathers of gangsta rap, N.W.A.’s album “Straight Outta Compton” cemented its reputation as a crime hotspot with the controversial hit “Fuck tha Police”. MTV boycotted and called the FBI into action. Compton, that was poverty, violence and a huge amount of nihilism and resignation.
The setting of the story dramatized in the film »King Richard«, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, is not just any old fairy tale, but the very true fairy tale of the rise of sisters Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) Williams unfolding Start exactly – and of all places – there. Guided by their father, Richard (Will Smith) and their mother, Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis), they grow into the two greatest female tennis stars the world has ever seen.
When the »Niggaz Wit Attitudes« published their hip-hop manifesto in 1988, Venus and Serena were seven and eight years old and practicing on a run-down public tennis court, which already seems out of place here and which the gangs really need to hang out . Richard Williams collects used syringes from the pitch and used balls from the clubs where the white moneyed gentry swing their clubs, which would otherwise have ended up in the trash. He worked out the plan for his daughters’ path to the top of the tennis world in detail before they were born and wrote it down in a book.
This truly surreal story is not told for the first time in »King Richard«. As early as 2012, the documentary »Venus and Serena« (directors: Maiken Baird and Michelle Major) impressively captured the sisters’ careers with interviews and early video material made in the family. In the title, he still sticks to the famous name that almost everyone knows outside of the world of tennis, but even in the portrait of the athletes it becomes clear that the central figure of the story is the father, who is unshakably convinced of success: he doesn’t just kick against adverse circumstances, but pursues his plan as steadfastly as if he knew the future, however improbable that may seem.
At the same time – this is touching both in the documentary and in the feature film version – he always has the loyalty of his daughters, who not only love and admire him, but also trust him unconditionally. This is what sets Richard Williams apart from other ambitious parents obsessed with the success of their children, such as Joseph Jackson, the notorious short temper, founder of the Jackson Five and tyrannical father of Michael, Jermaine and Janet. “Promotion” of children, which drives them to top performance in single-digit years, is definitely a double-edged sword – often enough also in tennis, which is not lacking in over-ambitious eccentric fathers – but not here. How is it that the dark sides of the whole arrangement are not mentioned in the film? Did they really just not exist? Richard Williams only wants the best for his daughters, especially in character terms, and he gets it: They fight a bit over school grades and other trifles, but that’s about it.
So »King Richard« does not tell any wild existential ups and downs about exploitation, punishment or painful deprivation. Ultimately, this is more of a solemn biopic than a sports drama. In a way, we really do find ourselves in a fairytale world where talent and goodness flow from an inexhaustible cornucopia and the fabulous skills of the two sisters quickly convince all doubters. The fact that tennis is an almost entirely white sport, in which a completely different ethos is required for black athletes, one that takes on prejudice and racism – that is also part of the father’s prenatal master plan, who, by the way, is not an athlete himself, but to be himself Has read knowledge as a trainer and taught it himself through detailed studies of recorded tennis matches. Incidentally, he revolutionized another sport.
»King Richard« puts him at the center of the story, and unfortunately that’s where the problem with this film lies: part of the story is that he is universally underestimated and misjudged for a long time because of his humble, idiosyncratic nature. In his adaptation, Will Smith exaggerates those traits of the character that make her seem inscrutable and, shall we say, cognitively and socially restricted, in an unmistakable grasp for Oscar glory to the point of caricature (he already won the Golden Globe for it this year). To the same extent that »King Richard« largely avoids inner conflicts and thus progresses quite slowly, he denies the main character any acumen beyond a basic attitude that is stubborn to the point of complete rebelliousness and thus curtails her in her competence. Exactly the step that would have made the feature film version a worthwhile venture, daring to take a deep look into psychological and social contradictions, he doesn’t take and instead unwinds well-known things linearly. Antagonists in this film only come from the outside and are never really serious. »King Richard« may want to focus entirely on the character, but fails to approach her in the way a cinematic portrait would have demanded.
