Possibly the most shameless oscar bait of the year and the film that might finally win Will Smith his coveted statuette.
Richard Williams (Will Smith) lives in Compton, Calif. With his wife Brandi (Onzhania Ellis) and five daughters, whom he is struggling to protect from the horrors of the ghetto: he makes them study for the same A's and plays tennis with them every day - the latter is especially good leaves with two youngest children, Serena (Demi Singleton) and Venus (Saniya Cindy). The family does not have money for training at a sports school and expensive courts, so Richard goes to all the famous coaches and convinces them to take girls for free - after all, someday they will definitely become champions. Around everyone thinks the father is possessed and, perhaps, slightly crazy, but he is sure that he is right - after all, he has a plan and he sticks to it.
A good psychological thriller would have turned out from the biography of Richard Williams: just imagine, a person in advance, before the birth of children, planned the whole future for them, decided what they would do and controlled their life at every step. Sounds creepy. It sounds like the tragedy of a man who himself grew up in a disadvantaged area was deprived of the opportunity to realize himself in sports, and now compensates for his own failures, broadcasting dreams and aspirations through his daughters. In any sport, there are always such parents: they shout the loudest in the stands, try to teach coaches (Richard does this more than once) and rejoice at any children's successes, as if they belong to them personally. In this sense, "King Richard" is a remarkably accurate portrait of an obsessed father, one of millions of others (minus the stories about the Ku Klux Klan and the ghetto), with the exception that he was lucky to have really talented daughters.
Will Smith seems to be playing such a character: a man hunched under the weight of past defeats, whose paternal love borders on an unhealthy manic obsession. He really scares at those moments when he deprives his daughters of the little joys of life because of his own strange attitudes or forces them to re-watch Cinderella so that they finally understand its true meaning - that “you must always be modest” (a quality that the most cinematic Richard is not very much inherent). And when other heroes accuse him of self-centeredness, they only want to nod in approval.
But the authors themselves, it seems, do not think so: they deduce Richard as an unambiguously positive hero. Any wild idea of his - like looking for a free coach or refusing to play in the junior championships - turns out to be right in the end. All the hard "lessons of life" that he teaches to his daughters are presented as the wisdom of a sensei. The obsession with control becomes the path to success - after all, Venus and Serena really became champions, which means that he did everything right. In those rare moments when Richard stumbles and does something wrong, he is immediately corrected by his wife - whose role in the film is, in principle, limited to rare intimate monologues that return her husband to the right path (it seems that such roles usually win Oscars for the background).
And the problem is not in some moral aspect of the issue: they say, the film positively portrays a person whom someone may not perceive as positive. The point is in the discrepancy between the intonation and the material - "King Richard" shows one thing, but with all the dramatic and directing tools it prompts to think something completely different. One gets the feeling that Will Smith just turned out to be too good an actor for this movie - and found in his hero that dark side that the film itself almost ignores. We clearly see his vulnerability, insecurity, destructive egocentrism, an obsessive desire to do everything according to a personal plan, without listening to anyone around. And we wait until it finally comes out sideways to him - but it doesn’t come out. After all, "King Richard" is not a thriller, but a success story in spite of the whole world, so sweet and one-sided that it was as if Richard Williams himself shot it. A film that seems to want to be "Coach Carter" - but it almost turns out to be "Temporary Difficulties".
Moreover, as a spirit-lifting sports drama, the film also works in a strange way. There is no story of overcoming, an emotional roller-coaster where the hero's ascent to the top is impossible without a terrible fall. It seems to be necessary to rejoice: finally, at least someone got rid of the stale genre clichés. But the effect is rather the opposite - after "King Richard" you understand that the cliché was not invented for nothing. Take them away, and you get a story about people who were told from the very beginning that they would succeed - and then it really worked out. There is not a single big active conflict in the film at all, only a passive confrontation between the hero and the incomprehensible world, from which he always, without much effort, emerges victorious.
And even the social drama around the heroes does not specifically concern them. We are shown the murders in the ghetto, there is police violence on TV, Richard Williams tells stories of the Ku Klux Klan and the wealthy whites who beat him when he was a child. All of this draws well the context in which Serena and Venus grew up - and, in general, makes it clear why their father turned out to be just like that. And yet, it doesn't bother them in any way - yes, it's poor, yes, it's sad, but in the end they will still get into all the prestigious tennis clubs without any problems, and on the way to success they will meet exactly one racist: one of the coaches will say that girls are better off "trying their hand at basketball." That is, the context seems to exist parallel to the film and is needed mainly to raise the stakes - they say, this is not just a story of two girls, but a story about a breakthrough of a whole social class in sports, where only whites used to play. Just to convey this, “King Richard” for some reason has to explain the meanings in words and throw at the viewer tortured dialogues that intelligibly decipher the entire movie. In general, the film says a lot and does little, here all the important plot twists and turns and changes within the characters occur exclusively in words - we hardly see them in action. The film prefers the pathos of a worn out manifesto to the language of cinema. Well, we are waiting at the Oscars.
This article was sponsored by MINKON LEE.
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