Southpaw Goes to the Movies
"King Richard" is full of useful contradictions
Dear readers,
For white Brooklyn boys like us, it’s been an absolutely stellar past few months of cinematic releases: the new James Bond film, Dune, The French Dispatch, and Todd Haynes’ new Velvet Underground documentary, just to name a few. Through it all, though, we here at Southpaw have been particularly excited about one new film: King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green.
Of course, we love a good Oscar-baity, triumphalist sports flick just as much as the next guy, but King Richard really falls squarely in our wheelhouse: sports, politics, high drama, all packed into two and a half hours. King Richard came out in theaters (and on HBO Max) on Friday, so the two of us went on a little Southpaw date night to take it in on the big screen. We were originally going to write a review, but after seeing it, we figured the movie lent itself better to a little back-and-forth discussion, which is what we’ve given you below. We hope you enjoy it—and once you’re done reading, go see the movie!
-Calder & Ian
Southpaw Goes to the Movies: “King Richard” is full of useful contradictions
Ian: For readers who haven’t seen the film yet, King Richard tells the story of the Williams sisters' rise from the Compton ghetto to the height of tennis stardom, with a particular focus on their relationship with their father Richard (portrayed by Will Smith). We are told that if you lived through Venus and Serena’s meteoric rise—we were still in diapers—you probably remember Richard, or at least the version of that appeared in the press coverage: brash, overbearing, a little bit unhinged, and almost universally disdained by the stuffy and overwhelmingly white tennis establishment. Famously, Richard wrote a 78-page master plan for his daughters’ lives, charting out in obsessive detail the path they would travel to become tennis superstars. Since basically everyone already knows how the Williams sisters’ stories end, the movie is, in effect, an extended character sketch of Richard, complicating the portrait of the man that the tennis media started to create over twenty-five years ago.
Before we get into the political weeds, I’ll just ask this: Richard occupies a lot of roles in the movie—father, coach, husband, agent, PR mastermind. Which did you find the most interesting or compelling?
Calder: The movie, I think, ultimately succeeds as a portrait of a difficult, loving dad and his relationship with his children. So the “father” aspect is the one I want to delve into a little. Venus and Serena Williams were involved in the production of the film, which, combined with the trailer, made me a little bit worried that it was going to be just a worshipful portrait, in the same way that Michael Jordan’s involvement with The Last Dance changed how the project looked. But the movie presented Richard as a complex figure who was certainly not always right. Without getting too far into spoiler territory, there were real flaws there.
I think that’s why I enjoyed it. We have inherited this media portrait of Richie Williams as a bit of a huckster who made his daughters’ success about himself. But as the film makes clear, the Williams sisters managed to enter a world that was built in order to keep them out, in no small part because of the confidence of their father. Throughout King Richard, we see Richard holding off on taking the first offer that’s presented to him and refusing to play by the rules that everyone around him is insisting that he must play by. It’s in some ways counterintuitive—we see him desperate to get his girls a coach, for example, but he’s also unwilling to listen when coaches say the kids have to play on the junior tournament circuit. But maybe that’s what it took for Venus and Serena, in particular, to succeed. What do you think of his contradictions?
Ian: I think Richard’s contradictions serve as a sort of mirror for the contradictions in professional tennis—and the reason that he’s able to serve as such an effective mirror is that he’s a complete outsider. In one of the first lines of the movie, Richard says something to the effect of, “In Shreveport, Louisiana [where he grew up], peoples wasn’t playing tennis because they were too busy running from the Klan.” The irony is that even inside the world of professional tennis, Richard and his daughters are still basically running from the Klan—not literally, of course, but they’re still forced to navigate all sorts of racist attitudes and hostile white people and exploitative systems.
One of the fascinating contradictions about professional tennis that Richard detects is that tennis depends on the individuality of its players, but it also destroys that individuality. As you mentioned, the film is punctuated by these moments when Richard and his daughters are expected to play by “the rules”—to enter the junior competitive circuit, or to take the first multimillion-dollar endorsement, or to adopt one technical style over another. This rulebook effectively creates “stars”—the sort of massive, larger-than-life personalities that tennis needs to survive commercially. I think what Richard is able to see is that this system also inevitably destroys individuality, because the people it produces all serve the same purpose, which is to make someone else money. I don’t want to turn Richard and his daughters into anti-capitalist heroes, because they’re not, but Richard’s reluctance to “play by the rules” does, I think, arise from a genuine insight into the way that capitalism and competitive sports combine to create this set of rules that superficially champions individual people and their particular qualities, but which ultimately is really homogenizing.
Here’s the million-dollar question, though: Does the movie make a discernible political argument? Of course, there are parts of the narrative that touch on race and class and gender dynamics and so on, but how would you describe the movie’s political outlook? Or does it not have one at all?
Calder: Before I answer I want to briefly touch on the Klan point: when Richard is meeting with some potential sponsors at a country club, he sardonically thanks them for “taking their hoods off” to meet with him. Just some more evidence for the point you were making.
I have a couple of responses to your question. First, I don’t think all art has to hold in itself an obvious takeaway. And I think that compulsion—to give everything a message—is part of why big studios have largely stopped making particularly interesting movies. I don’t think that Richard Williams would agree with me on that point. There’s a scene in King Richard where he puts on Cinderella. After the movie’s over, he insists that all of his kids go around and say what they learned. When he’s unsatisfied with their answers, he threatens to start it over again. (Cinderella is, in Richard’s analysis, apparently about humility).
If the movie does have any sort of discernable political message, it’s the belief carried by its titular character that hard work leads to success and that it’s possible to overcome long odds to pull oneself out of poverty. If not an entirely conservative belief, it’s pretty American Dream-y. But again, the film is more complicated than that. Richard and his daughters are invading a white space and cracking open the door to make it more diverse.
The contradicting messages in King Richard align themselves well with Richard Williams himself. It’s an old-school sports movie while also being a legitimately eye-opening product that gets at the ruptures created by and inherent in family life.
Also, Will Smith is going to win that Oscar.
Any closing thoughts?
Ian: That’s a good point—though I would note that at points, the movie almost invites a more explicitly political reading, for instance when Venus and Serena’s mother, Oracene, is watching coverage of the Rodney King riots during a family dinner. But you’re right—it’s a movie about contradictions, and it’s not all that useful to try to resolve them into a tidy message.
I agree with you about the Oscar, and I think we haven’t seen the last of Saniyya Sidney (Venus) and Demi Singleton (Serena) either.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
. . . the latest on a Chinese tennis player’s sexual assault allegations against a top Chinese government official—and her subsequent disappearance? “The WTA cares enough about Peng Shuai to stand up to China. Does anyone else?” by Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post (November 18, 2021).
. . . the details of MLB’s plan to house minor leaguers? “M.L.B. Finalizes Plan to Provide Housing for Minor Leaguers,” by James Wagner in The New York Times (November 19, 2021).
. . . the NHL’s climate hypocrisy? “NHL touts ‘greener rinks’ while promoting powerful pollutants, advocates say,” by Rick Maese in The Washington Post (November 17, 2021).