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For better or worse, he was always there.
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The reason for this is, in some ways, an answer to the second question: No halfway honest movie could focus on the teenage Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) without also focusing on Richard. And even when it falls back on familiar beats or airbrushes away unflattering details (it’s worth noting that Venus, Serena and their sister Isha Price are among the executive producers), “King Richard,” assuredly directed by Green from a thoughtful, angular script by Zach Baylin, is never uninteresting. The best ones tend to come at their real-life subjects from a more oblique angle, putting what this movie’s milieu compels me to call an interesting spin on the material.
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With few exceptions, the celebrity biopic has long been the clunky white elephant of Hollywood moviemaking, a vehicle for reductive insights, canned uplift, middling impersonations and unexamined idol worship. To tackle the first question: Sure, if deserve is the word. Don’t Venus and Serena Williams deserve biopics of their own? Why does a movie about two game-changing athletes focus on their dad? And the paternalistic perspective of “King Richard” - which, like its title, both critiques and lionizes its subject - might provoke a similar irritation. His plan worked, the closing titles reassure us, which doesn’t entirely neutralize the exasperation of his company. The details of the outsize role that Richard Williams played in Venus and Serena’s success are by now well known: the exhaustive 70-plus-page plan he wrote for them the rain-or-shine practices he led on Compton’s cracked-concrete tennis courts his headline-generating decision to keep his daughters from playing in junior tournaments his unapologetically self-promotional media interviews his my-way-or-the-highway attitude in every situation. But for all his initially boundless energy, he sometimes betrays a haggard, heavy-eyed exhaustion, as if even he were getting a little tired of his company. Running around town in his tennis-coach regalia of short shorts and knee-high socks, Richard cajoles, insists, argues and refuses to take no for an answer. As played by an outstanding, wholly committed, sometimes fearlessly insufferable Will Smith, Richard is a combination of helicopter parent, personal publicist, battle strategist and drill sergeant, with a disarmingly friendly, quippy manner that doubles as an instrument of persuasion. This is admittedly rich advice coming from Richard, who is easily the most stubborn, closed-minded person in the movie and possibly the greater Los Angeles area. And because sports dramas and biopics are all about tidy metaphors, it’s also a lesson: Stay loose. It’s a nifty running gag, rooted in the truth: Richard and his then-wife, Oracene, really did teach their daughters this method, which would become more widely adopted in the wake of their fame and influence. To anyone who will listen (and some who won’t), Richard Williams demands that his young daughters Venus and Serena use an open-stance technique, not the closed stance favored by most others. “Keep your stance open.” These words, or some variation on them, form a steady refrain in “King Richard,” Reinaldo Marcus Green’s shrewd, slick and enormously satisfying drama about the forging of a pair of tennis superstars.