144 min | PG-13 | November 19, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Richard Williams writes a plan to make his daughters tennis champions before they are born. Will Smith plays him as a stubborn visionary who is impossible to argue with and usually right. The man and the movie both refuse to know their place.
Richard Williams raises two daughters in Compton with a single objective. Venus and Serena will become the best tennis players in the world. He drills them on public courts while gang members watch from the sidelines. He hauls a homemade brochure to every coach who will take the meeting and most who will not. The film is a sports biopic on its surface and a study of a controlling father underneath. It asks whether a man who is right about the destination gets a pass on how he drags everyone there.
Will Smith plays Richard with a hunched walk and a refusal to back down that reads as armor and ego at once. He gives the man real contradictions. Richard shields his daughters from exploitation and turns their childhood into a campaign in the same breath. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Oracene Price and quietly takes every scene she shares with Smith. Her one direct confrontation with Richard exposes the parts of the story he tells about himself that are not true. Saniyya Sidney plays Venus with a teenager’s hunger to compete that the script keeps finding reasons to delay.
Reinaldo Marcus Green directs the tennis with patience. The match sequences hold on long rallies instead of chopping them into highlights, so the pressure on Venus builds in real time. Zach Baylin’s script keeps Richard at the center even when the daughters are the ones on the court. Robert Elswit shoots the Compton courts in warm flat daylight and the Florida academy in cooler manicured greens, charting the family’s move from struggle to opportunity without a line of dialogue. The film looks handsome and stays conventional. It never takes a formal risk that matches the risk Richard takes.
This is a crowd-pleaser built to send you home satisfied. It hits the beats a sports movie has to hit and hits them with skill. The trouble is that it loves Richard as much as Richard loves himself. It gestures at the cost of his methods and then backs away before the cost can land. The result is a polished and moving film that flatters its subject instead of interrogating him.