Will Smith Crowns Himself in King Richard

Will Smith’s third Oscar nomination for another bad biopic, this time King Richard, proves that among black movie stars he is insuperable. If his previous Oscar bids, The Pursuit of Happyness and Ali, didn’t kill his good-time rapper and action-blockbuster career, nothing will. Never a substantive actor, Smith is the epitome of glib triumph. Playing Richard Williams, father of the successful tennis siblings Venus and Serena Williams, Smith discards the slick humor that made him famous and goes for black pathos. His Richard Williams speaks in a Southern accent as slow as the one Smith used in his bizarre, soporific impersonation of Muhammad Ali, overstressing Richard’s mush-mouthed down-home certitude: “Venus and Serena gon shake up dis wurl!” Slick Willie condescends to the idea of black working-class humility.

Not content to tell a success story, Smith sells a martyrdom story. Satisfying his egotism by taking on other black men’s struggles has been the method in every one of Smith’s biopics except the fascinating football medical exposé Concussion, about Bennet Omalu, the controversial doctor specializing in the treatment of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. King Richard pushes aside the story of the Williams sisters to heroize their father’s determination to launch their talents. Against the odds, he works hard, drives a rickety van, and even suffers physical assault, though none more torturous than Smith’s dialect-heavy near-caricature. (“Da mos’ dangerous creature on dis hol urth is a woman who know how to think, ain’t nuthin’ she cain’t do” — a speech to embarrass Mark Twain’s Negroisms.)

So there’s a reason King Richard is not massively popular. The sacrificial-dad scenario that was so moving in Chen Kaige’s Together, in which an uncultured father toils to support his musical prodigy son, doesn’t translate to this American tale, calculated to hang an honorific on a story of black masculine perseverance that many will find unexceptional. King Richard creates a cliché, not a character — a BLM form of blaxploitation.

Smith acquiesces to contemporary platitudes that stereotype the black male work ethic as churlish and autocratic, confusing those traits with strength. Smith doesn’t focus Richard’s fortitude and countrified manner. While Chen’s melodrama in Together was emotionally galvanizing, Richard’s stubborn predictions about his daughters’ success seem arrogant and become annoying, and their triumph seems predetermined.

Scenes where Richard distrusts white authorities yet solicits the aid of Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), who coached Pete Sampras and John McEnroe, then overrules suggestions by the girls’ white coach Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal) reveal his competitiveness — even competing with his daughters. This is simply not believable, but we are meant to accept those scenes on the basis of already knowing of the Williams sisters’ success. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green and screenwriter Zach Baylin don’t credit luck or fortune; they offer an elongated series of insipid bromides: Richard setting straight a jealous neighbor, facing down ghetto thugs, opposing contemptuous social workers. It’s a lecture in the guise of a family drama, yet Green and Baylin miss the family-community pulse that illuminated the young black girl’s triumph in Doug Atchison’s Akeelah and the Bee.

Smith’s Richard is not a king, he’s Tevye with African-American resentment: Tevye surrounded by a house full of women, gabby girls who need to be put in order, Tevye without a connection to God. This disconnection from cultural history — the black essence of Akeelah, the Asian essence of Together — may explain why black tennis pioneers Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe are never mentioned. Instead, Smith makes himself the dynamo at the center of black strivers’ history.

It seems an odd conceit when the girls’ legend is secondary to the father’s persistence. Yet Richard’s vision has no backstory — only the stereotypical tenacity that Green and Baylin needlessly extended to nearly three hours of shallow ideas about black patriarchy. They seem surprised by an in-home black patriarchal presence. King Richard is the first time Smith has worked with a black film director, and it’s plain that he needs stewardship and understanding from a good, grounded filmmaker — like what Charles Stone III brought to Paid in Full, Mr. 3000, Drumline, and Uncle Drew.

Failing to realize the cultural particulars that form black manhood, King Richard contrives a benevolent tyrant. There’s more interest in an equity moment — as when Richard’s wife (Aunjanue Ellis) speaks her mind — than in exploring the details of their marriage and parenting arrangement, or in recalling old civil-rights-era notions of spiritual, ethical roots. When the black audience is treated to a film that plays out motivational speeches, it has an opposite effect: The audience feels talked-down-to, doesn’t enjoy it, and won’t watch. However, it’s the white liberal audience that feels “inspired,” free to indulge their condescension.