King Richard movie review: Will Smith aims for glory

Even in that highly competitive, fishbowl world of parenting, Richard Williams stood apart. He didn’t just dream big, he dreamed big twice over. Tennis was a rich man’s sport, a white man’s sport, and he was neither. And here we are, with all his predictions regarding his two daughters, Venus and Serena, coming true and more.

King Richard — with three of Richard’s five daughters associated with the film (he had several other children) — clearly is a portrayal sympathetic to the grizzly bearded man who was a permanent fixture by his daughters’ side. He bragged about them long before anyone had even seen them play, hustled and persisted, made controversial choices, ran his daughters’ lives (even the non-sporty ones) like a regimen, and was bull-headed about what was right for them, overruling even their coaches. But in this film and the warm, mellow treatment of the man by Smith, Richard is a father shorn clean of any rough edges.

His insistence that his overbearing decisions were prompted only by the desire to give his daughters a childhood, while giving them tennis lessons in pouring rain, is hard to digest. Some of his other decisions regarding his daughters seem to be a costly gamble, that fortunately for all concerned turned out fine.

Sidney as Venus and Singleton as Serena are terrific as girls clearly in awe of their father and deeply in love with him, but with no lives or personalities outside the tennis court (all the girls in fact merge into one another like one homogenous group) – and with no trace of resentment over it. Only Ellis as their mother Oracene is a woman of some shades and many doubts, who has seen Richard trip up many times, who can call him out, and who as primary provider of the family plus an athlete and also a coach to her daughters, has dreams but which are completely subsumed by his.

However, being parents, if there is one thing that we come to realise, it is that no person can know the right or wrong way to raise another’s child. Only that child can do it. And, this is clearly the way Serena and Venus see or would like the world to see their dad. As a man who, raised in the ghettos, with a string of failures behind him, seeking lessons for his children even in the story of Cinderella, giving them lessons on heritage and on speaking up for themselves, dreamed up a fairy tale that no one had before or perhaps ever will.

Clearly, the kids are alright.