New Music: Piazzolla, Jess Jocoy, Angie Goeke, Watershed Band

 

 

Astor Piazzolla (1921-92) is a renowned figure in Argentine music. It wasn’t always that way; some felt he tinkered too much with tradition. He was, however, the leading figure in nuevo tango, meaning he took classical orchestral-based tango, stripped it down, and merged it what he learned about dissonance and counterpoint from composers such as Stravinsky, Gershwin, and Bernstein. Ten years after his death, his widow set up a foundation dedicated to his music. An offshoot is Quinteto Astor Piazzolla whose Operation Tango takes the maestro to new levels. Pablo Mainetti now mans the bandoneon (a full-sounding concertina) and like Piazzolla, melds it with melancholy piano, sorrowful violin, guitar, and double bass. Other selections, such as the title track, are filled with big drama in which we can definitely hear Gershwin’s influences even as you reach for your sexy duds and dancing shoes. Every piece on Operation Tango will make your heart break or leap, depending. Alas, it’s hard to find selections for viewing. I recommend viewing parts of this concert. If you like it, you’ll love the new record. The five members are faithful to the style Piazzolla pioneered for more than a decade and take full advantage of improvements in sound technology to make the maestro’s compositions sound even richer. ★★★★★

 

 

 

I was tempted to spotlight Jess Jocoy as my artist of the month as I really liked where she is heading. Let There Be No Despair showcases a maturing voice with deeper patina that gives contrast to her higher tones. The title track sentiment says it all. Jocoy’s response to the Covid lockdown and other worldly traumas has been to accentuate the positive and replace gloom with hope. To do this, she put herself in other people’s shoes and assumed the role of a storyteller. “I Will Be Glad” is an ode to the small joys we are given. In a simple line such as I’m with my mother every day and I wear the traits more than ever, she projects into the future–even returning to the dust from which she came–and suggests we should be grateful for small moments of bliss. She imagines herself as a deserted barren woman in “The Gardner”: My body couldn’t do her sacred duty as a woman. But instead of wallowing, Jocoy’s protagonist tends a garden in the unforgiving climate of Montana, a substitute way of making and preserving life. My favorite track is “Living in a Dying Town,” a bittersweet take on returning to a town where everything’s changing and there’s no reason to stay. Yet she also honors those who put down roots and remain. There’s good songwriting throughout, but a few things make Let There Be No Despair fall short of a career-altering album. First, the arrangements are similar and cries out for a signature song that makes you want to sing along or dance. Jocoy is Nashville-based and hopes to make it in country music, but too much of the album is reflective in ways more in accord with folk music. She could also benefit by becoming more of a song interpreter and tamping down her desire to impress. She has chops and range, but she is often overly dynamic and doesn’t articulate clearly. A few good hooks and more variety would push Jocoy to the next level. ★★★★     

 

 

 

Angie Goeke grew up in an Austin, Texas, church-going musical family and counts Ella Fitzgerald and Willie Nelson among her musical influences. This tips us off that her blend of Americana will fall on the jazz/bluegrass/country side of the ledger. Her debut full release If I Were Honest reflects that, if we toss in a bit of folk music as well. Goeke is trying to work things out, not preach. “So I Pray” is a fragile song in which she warbles to Kaitlyn Raitz’s cello as she catalogues … Lies and betrayal …. The fear, the fights, the shattered wine glass on the wall/Everyday those dark shadows come to call/So I pray. If anything, it’s too pained, as it’s often hard to make out the lyrics, but we get it. What might be harder to get though, is where Goeke wishes to position herself in the musical world. There’s nothing wrong with being eclectic, but the risk on a debut is being claimed by everyone or no one. She compares herself to the liquid in “Whiskey in a Teacup,” fiery with a kick and the song is a country rocker, yet “Leftovers” is more music hall than country. The piano-based title song trends toward torchy songbird and “Fly Baby Fly” is a sweet supportive song about her kids. See a pattern? I’m not sure if producer (and country artist) Mary Bragg did Goeke any favors by allowing her to spread her wings too broadly. ★★★

 

 

 

The Columbus, Ohio-based Watershed Band has released Against the Grain, their 10th full-length album. If you’ve never heard of them and wonder why, it’s probably because they formed when several band members were still in middle school, and because they are not a conventional rock band in any sense. Lead singer/lead guitarist Colin Gawel owns a coffee shop and bass player Joe Oestreich is an English prof at Coastal Carolina University when he’s not on the road with the band. They also sound more like a bluegrass/country/soft rock ensemble than the sort of outfit that blows you away with crunchy loud electric solos. “Someday” has a decided bluegrass helter-skelter feel and “Bluebird” a slice of folk rock. Much of “King of Spades,” especially its harmonies, evokes The Beach Boys, and “Fire Catcher” opens with a bit of banjo for a song that merges grass with some rock-style vocals. Since they are mostly on rock’s quiet end on this album, why not a love song like “You?” ★★★

 

Rob Weir

Art Road Trip: New Mexico I

 

Museum of Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

[Click images for bigger file size]

 

One of the joys of traveling for art fans is that it provides opportunities to see works you seldom see in your own backyard. The Albuquerque Museum (MoA) is less visited than it should be, perhaps because it’s a hybrid that also tries to spotlight some of the city’s history and its people, but it’s mostly an art museum.

 

Like many museums that can’t or simply don’t give into the temptation to launch expensive blockbuster shows, the MoA had assembled a small but innovative special exhibit when I visited in April. In this case, it was to a color: indigo. The blue pigment, which ranges from near black to purple, originally came from plants. (Today a lot is synthetic.) The very word is linguistically linked to India, since Europeans often imported it from there. Here are a few items from the show.  

 

Sashiko Farmer's Coat (Japan)

 

Laura Anderson Barbata "Little Jaguar"

 

If you’re an Easterner such as I, another striking feature of the MoA is noticing how the aesthetics of art produced in the West differs from those of the East. There is, for instance, art made by Native Americans. Much that one sees at the MoA is of recent vintage, but rooted in older forms. It was my first immersion into the work of the talented Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940), a Native-American woman enrolled in three Western tribes. (Ironically, her BA is from Framingham State in Massachusetts.)  She is an activist who works in numerous media and has a cheeky sense of humor and a modernist sensibility. Spend some time looking at “Herding” (1985), as it takes a few moments for its lines and symbols to come into focus. Nor is her “Albuquerque” (1998) the first thing that springs to mind when you hear that word.

 

"Herding"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Albuquerque"

 

Names can be deceptive in the West, given centuries of intermarriage. Fritz Scholder has links to California’s Luiseno peoples, hence his “Man in White Suit” (1983) is not a form of cultural appropriation. The same is true of Alan Hauser, an Apache. His “Mountain Spirit Dancer” (1993) is an eye-catching small sculpture that differs from much of his largescale work one sees in Santa Fe galleries. 

 

"Man in White Suit"

 

 

New Mexico was where the atomic bomb was first developed and tested. It played a big role in defeating Japan, but it’s important to remember the effects it had one those living downwind of Los Alamos. Tony Price wasn’t an Indian, but his metallic “Atomic Firebird” (1994) is a subtle reminder of literal fallout. In a more amusing vein, but packed with the suggestion that Natives are often so marginalized they might as well be aliens, is potter Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), whose “Mayans from Mars” (1995) makes you chuckle and consider. 

 

"Atomic Firebird"

 

"Mayans from Mars"

 

The West is just flat out big, thus it’s hardly surprising to see how humans represent the land, the elements, and surviving in their midst. Carl Von Hassler gave us adobe, laundry, and dust in “New Mexico Landscape” (1920) and Carl Redin “Village in Moonlight” (1920s). Peter Hurd offered commentary on the precariousness of humans in that big landscape in his “A Shower in a Dry Year” (1969).

 

Von Hassler

 

Redin

 

 

Hurd

 

As you might have surmised, sculpture is well represented at the MoA, both inside and out. Paul Suttman was from Connecticut, but his sculpture at the MoA with the catch-your-breath title “Braque Visited by the Conquering Venus Armed with Apples of Discord” (1991) is either a cool mashup of modernist sensibilities or a parody thereof (your choice). I also quite liked Ron Cooper’s “Labyrinth of Gravity (1990).”

 

Suttman

 

 

 

Cooper

 

If, after a while, you get homesick for the East, Andrew Wyeth will cure it. The MoA has a painting from his “Karl” series, this one from 1948.

 

Andrew Wyeth

 

 

 

Rob Weir

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days Reconstructs a Tragedy

 

ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS (2021)

By Rebecca Donner

Little, Brown and Company, 576 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Rebecca Donner faced a problem I have known. How do you write history based on family lore, fragmentary evidence, and lacunae? The answer is to start with what you know for certain, fill in where possible, and make logical inferences where sources fail.

 

The topic of Donner’s work of non-fiction, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, is embodied in its subtitle: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler. That woman was Mildred Fish Harnack (1902-43), who was Donner’s great-great aunt. She was the only American woman executed via Hitler’s direct order.

 

Mildred was born in Milwaukee, the daughter of lower middle-class parents. She obtained degrees in English literature from the University of Wisconsin, where she met a German national, Arvid Harnack, a Ph.D philosophy student. They married in 1926 and made the fateful decision to move to Berlin in 1930, she to teach and to work on her own Ph.D. The Harnacks were idealistic and allied with socialist groups. Their political values–feminism, women’s suffrage, worker rights, and anti-fascism–were safe enough in 1930, but became increasingly dangerous when Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and began to dismantle whatever democracy remained in Germany’s post-World War I Weimar Republic. The Harnacks were among the first to warn that Hitler was an existential threat, not just a loud-mouthed buffoon.

 

The Harnacks tried to play it safe whilst quietly building domestic opposition to Hitler to undermine him. What came to be called The Circle was a loose organization of dedicated idealists like Mildred and Arvid plus various diplomatic personnel that offered clandestine support. Caution aside, The Circle proved no match for the Gestapo. Moreover, some of their contacts, including those in Josef Stalin’s NKVD, proved so incompetent they mentioned names in cables without encrypting them or using aliases. The upshot is that the Harnacks were arrested while trying to flee from Germany in September 1942. Arvid was executed and Mildred was sentenced to six years of hard labor, a sentence vacated by Hitler. On February 16, 1943, she was guillotined.

 

These are the bare facts, pieced together from snippets in archives, mentions in official documents, newspaper reports, diary slivers, and ephemera. Missing are most of Mildred’s letters, which were burned by her older sister. Those lost sources are tragic from a historical point of view, but perhaps not from a literary one. Donner’s reconstructed history reads like a novel, albeit a sometimes disjointed one. Donner had to range far afield to give context for inferential leaps, thus a wide array of characters appear, many of whom are not household names. For instance, one of Mildred’s most effective couriers was Donald Heath, Jr. the young son of an American consul/spy in Berlin. He came to Mildred to be tutored and left with documents to be passed to contacts. We also meet Martha Dodd, the gadfly daughter of the American ambassador, who spied for the Soviet Union.

 

There are so many others that, when added to a narrative that is often non-linear, can seem confusing. Don’t worry about all the names. Instead consider Donner’s succinct account of how the Nazis came to power with blitzkrieg speed and how they undermined democracy via methods distressingly similar to Donald Trump’s tactics: rambling digressions, eliminating non-loyalists, manufacturing internal and external enemies, and justifying repression in the name of making Germany great again. (You could even find parallels between the 1933 Reichstag fire, Kristallnacht, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol.)

 

I found Donner’s subtitle overly dramatic. One could easily argue that The Circle was more a figment of idealistic imaginations than a conspiracy capable of taking down the Nazis. The Circle was effective for a time as a spying operation and in aiding a small number of Jews, but the Harnacks were as a reckless as they were restless. They were correct in their dire warnings and brave in mien and action, but the overall impression is that of a dedicated band of amateurs up against a machine too powerful for their ilk.

 

But let us give credit to Donner for assembling a thrilling collage. If you had any doubt that Hitler and Stalin were monsters, Donner will dispel them in simple (though not simplistic) language. More’s the pity Hitler wasn’t eliminated earlier and that it took six years of war and more than 70 million deaths to accomplish what the Harnacks could not.

 

Rob Weir   

The Darkest Game: Weak Title, Smart Book

 

THE DARKEST GAME (2022)

By Joseph Schneider

Sourcebooks/Poison Pen Press, 354 pages

★★★★

 

 

 

We are told not to judge a book by its cover. Still, were I involved with Joseph Schneider’s Tully Jarsdel mystery, I’d change the title. It’s certainly plenty dark, but so many books with “dark” and “darkness” in the title are paint-by-the-numbers offerings.

 

There’s little that’s formulaic about The Darkest Game. How many detectives do you know who speak Farsi (and is working on his fifth non-English tongue), dropped out of a history Ph.D. program, has two fathers, and can recognize valuable sculptures at a glance? We find Tully teamed with Oscar Morales in what is certainly the odd couple of detectives. Oscar is Tully’s hardboiled opposite, a heavyset Latino family man whose idea of culture is television. He’s also at ease with cop banter, protocol, grab-and-go cuisine, and mugs of beer. Tully was raised by two professors–his biological father is ill with lung cancer–who have never made peace with his decision to become a homicide detective but schooled him in proper grammar, academic research, wine, film, and upper-middle class values. They only thing they haven’t taught him is the circumstances under which his “Baba,” Professor Darius Jahangir, left Iran after the Islamic revolution of 1979.  

 

Tully and Oscar investigate the murder of Dean Burken, a museum conservator also in charge of deaccessioning for the prestigious Huntington Library and Museum in Greater Los Angeles. A lot of Burken’s colleagues disliked him, but that doesn’t make them killers. As Jarsdel applies logic and Morales more conventional police legwork, a prime suspect emerges, no thanks to the Huntington staff which seems far more interested in the institution’s reputation than solving Burken’s murder. One small problem: The suspect also becomes a corpse. On Santa Catalina Island, no less, some 22 miles offshore.

 

Jarsdel and Morales are sent to Catalina to investigate if there is a link between the two murders. They initially treat it as an expense-account vacation because it’s a proverbial longshot that there’s any connection between Burken’s brutal murder and the suspect’s death. Still, some things are weird in Avalon, the town that contains 3,700 of the island’s population of less than 4,100. The local sheriff, Captain Ken Oria, is cloyingly welcoming and he and his assistant Ledbetter, who plays the bad cop role, are intent on blaming everything that goes wrong locally on a weird bunch called the Natty Boys, a mashup of Pirates of the Caribbean, survivalists, libertarians, and a rough-stuff motorcycle gang. Plus, there’s Pruitt, the island’s resident developer/club owner/restaurant proprietor, who strikes Tully as a pompous jerk.  

 

This may sound like a variant of a standard mystery cast but if anything, Schneider’s plot suffers from being overly complex. Before the two central deaths are resolved and a third occurs, The Darkest Game delves into things such as the whereabouts of a 19^th century diary, the disposition of art works, a perplexing map, a real estate plan, detours into California history, half-truths and lies, a Ruger .38, a musket ball, and a show down.

 

Schneider overlays the action with the sometimes-tense interactions between Jarsdel and Morales, plus Tully’s quest to unravel his Baba’s life in Iran. The latter could have been saved for another book and somehow woven into a plot. Though it adds depth to Tully’s character, it isn’t germane to an ideas-packed narrative and slows a novel that’s already leisurely paced. Some readers might also think that Schneider drops in too many red herring suspects. It’s not a bad idea to jot down some notes to help keep characters straight, but I’d rather read a book open to charges of being too complicated than one that’s as obvious as a hobo at a black-tie dinner. I did work out the murderer, but Schneider led me places I did not expect to visit.

 

Thanks to #NetGalley and #PoisonedPenPress for an advance copy of this book.

 

Rob Weir

Going in Style: For a Tired-Brain Night

 

 

GOING IN STYLE (2017)

Directed by Zach Braff

Warner Brothers, 96 minutes, PG-13 (language, drug use)

★★★

 

 

 

We were riding out our Netflix subscription–Hint: Dust off your DVD player as you can request any disc you want through your local interlibrary loan system–because we were fed up with its paltry streaming of movies, TV shows, and documentaries we didn’t want to watch. Before we joined the 200,000 + who recently dumped Netflix we picked out a few movies we had vague interest in seeing, including Going in Style.  

 

It is loaded with elements I generally dislike; it oozes sentimentality, the comedy is as broad as the Mississippi during flood season, and it’s a remake of a pedestrian 1979 film that starred George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg. You can add to this that it’s a pastiche of other genres such as buddy films, capers, and corporate revenge fantasies. For all of that, it has a goofy charm that places it in that ambiguous category of “not too bad.”

 

It works because its principals–Alan Arkin, ­Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman–are terrific together in ways that make you think they must have had a ball working on such a trifling project. They are so good that they elevate the movie to levels it has no right ascending. Willie (Freeman) moved in with Albert (Arkin) since his divorce many years earlier and Joe (Caine) is about to lose his home to oily banker Chuck Lofton (Josh Pais) who condescendingly explains why he misled Joe about his adjustable-rate mortgage. Our three senior citizens are former factory workers who gather regularly for breakfast and banter reminiscent of that from the 1982 Barry Levinson classic Diner. They’ve got a lot to discuss. Joe is at his bank making a withdrawal when it’s robbed and he sees the tattoo of one of the crooks. He shares that information with FBI agent Hamer (Matt Dillon), but the robbers make a clean getaway.

 

Then a different type of robbery occurs. The factory from which the three old friends retired has been sold to a foreign firm. It promptly takes over the company’s pension fund and cuts off the workers without a dime. Like that could happen. Oh, wait! When Joe learns that the bankruptcy protection plan has been structured by his own bank, he thinks someone should rob the bloody thing a second time. Why not the three of them? Well, for starters they are old. Secondly, they haven’t the foggiest idea of how to pull off a heist. Enter Joe’s ex-son-in-law Murphy (Peter Serafinowicz) who knows a guy, Jesús (John Ortiz), who will school them for a cut if they are successful and disavow ever knowing them if they are caught. Hey, why not? What’s a lot of jail time for geezers if they fail?

 

The lads assemble alibis–one of which involves a senile acquaintance played by Christopher Lloyd­–get their gear together, and seek to outwit Agent Hamer. You won’t need much more than an 8^th grade education to follow any of the plot, nor a degree in philosophy to debate the film’s magical thinking ethics. You might need a handy barf bag for some of the subplots such as teaching Murphy to be a good father, Albert’s solid to Willie, or a burgeoning romance between Albert and man-hunting grocery clerk Annie (Ann-Margaret). In other words, Going in Style is a feel-good movie that bears as much resemblance to reality as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

 

The best way to enjoy Going in Style is to watch it on a tired-brain night and just go with it. You could ask questions such as why Murphy bears the same surname as Joe if he’s an ex-son-in-law but if you do, your brain isn’t tired enough. Just call it an escapist film, laugh when it’s funny, roll your eyes when it’s insipid, and put it back in the box when it’s over in an hour and a half. It made me smile, but it didn’t make me rethink canceling my Netflix subscription.

 

Rob Weir 

The Devil May Dance: The Rat Pack in a Murder Mystery

 

 

THE DEVIL MAY DANCE (2022)

By Jake Tapper

Little, Brown and Company, 315 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Jake Tapper is a CNN journalist. I’ve never seen him, nor have I read his other books, but he has hardboiled detective fiction down pat. For those uncertain what that means, the genre is gritty, sordid, sprinkled with innuendo and actual sex, and has snappy dialogue heavy on sarcasm and argot. Tapper’s drink is an old fashioned, an approach more akin to that of a Robert Ludlum or a Michael Connelly than many of today’s nuanced crime writers.

 

The Devil May Dance is also an imagined historical novel involving real people from the 1950s and 1960s, though his central characters Charlie and Margaret Marder are inventions. Charlie, a World War II vet, is a first-term Congressman from Manhattan who gets a rude initiation into the ways in which politics, crime, and celebrity overlap. The novel is set in Hollywood and New York. In what I learned is the sequel to Tapper’s The Hellfire Club, Charlie and Margaret are recruited, or should I say blackmailed, by Attorney General Robert Kennedy into investigating Frank Sinatra. It’s not really a choice; Charlie’s bad-company-keeping father is in jail and his only ticket out is Congressman Marder’s cooperation. So, it’s off to Los Angeles to be a “consultant” for a new Sinatra film, The Manchurian Candidate. Charlie and Margaret are charged with ingratiating themselves to Sinatra with the goal of spying on him and other Rat Pack members such as Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Peter Lawford, the latter of whom is married to Patricia Kennedy.

 

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is hailed as classic and Tapper mines its plot to make parallels to its web of deception. The movie (and the Richard Condon novel upon which it is based) is a quintessential Cold war story of a Korean War vet captured by communists, brainwashed, and used as a spy and potential assassin. Is Bobby Kennedy’s assignment really a matter of national security? Tapper keeps us guessing in a fast-paced tale of murder, double dealing, and sleaze. It’s often hard to detect who is crooked, who is an infiltrator pretending to be a wise guy, who can be trusted, and who is a skilled actor. There is a subplot involving a Harvey Weinstein-like character running a sex trade ring specializing in, shall we say, jail bait. (Tapper was no doubt influenced by Sue Lyon, the 14-year-old lead actress in Lolita and the love interest of 53-year-old James Mason.)

 

There is a lot going on in The Devil May Dance. There are mobsters such as Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli; film director John Frankenheimer; scandal rags; Disneyland; internal struggles between the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI; the rise of Scientology; and Fidel Castro. It’s no secret that many of the people in the novel were creeps in real-life–Hoover and L. Ron Hubbard, for instance–or bores (Bob Hope). Nor is a secret that the now-sainted Bobby Kennedy was a real S.O.B. when he was Attorney General. The big question in Tapper’s novel is the which-side-are-you-on role of Sinatra. He could be a brutal and crude man, but is he really what he appears to be in the book, a man wounded by his divorce from Ava Gardner? Hollywood is nicknamed Tinseltown for a reason; in its own way it’s every bit as illusory as Disneyland and just as powerful. As the book blurb puts it, “corruption and ambition form a deadly mix….” In such a milieu, nothing is beneath those holding onto power and privilege–not even stuffing a corpse into a congressman’s trunk. No wonder Bobby Kennedy wonders if it’s safe for his brother, President John F. Kennedy, to stay at Sinatra’s house during a West Coast fundraising trip. (Can even a president turn down an invite from Old Blue Eyes?)

 

You might that Tapper’s speculation rings entirely true. Conversely, you might find the entire thing a tank of banana oil. Either way, though, if you are a fan of thrillers, The Devil May Care is (if I might) a thrilling read.

 

Rob Weir  

King Richard: Too Much Richard, not Enough Venus

 

 

KING RICHARD (2021)

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

Warner Bros. Pictures, 145 minutes, PG-13 (language, violence, sexual reference)

★★★

 

 

 

Before the slap heard ‘round the world, Will Smith starred in the biopic King Richard. As you no doubt know, he won an Oscar for that performance. It might renew interest in a movie that flopped badly at the box office. Should it? I have mixed feeling about that.

 

Smith assumed the role of Richard Williams, the father of tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams, played by young actresses Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton respectively. The movie only takes us through 14-year-old Venus’ professional debut in 1994 and her second-round loss to Aranxa Sánchez Vicario (Marcela Zacharías), who resorted to dirty tricks to get back into a match she was losing. The subsequent rise of Venus and Serena to the top of tennis world is relegated to a postscript.

 

The movie has been criticized for being too much about Richard, shortchanging the coaching done by his then-wife Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis), and portraying the skills of his daughters as his own doing. These are valid complaints. King Richard is at its best in capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1980s when race was an obstacle the entire Williams family had to hurdle. In the 1950s, Althea Gibson starred, but she dented rather than knocked down racial barriers and quit competitive tennis for golf. Women’s tennis remained predominantly lily white until the emergence of the Williams sisters.

 

The tennis establishment was reluctant to accept that two Black kids from the Compton section of Los Angeles drilled and coached by their parents could compete with well-heeled and extensively-trained white kids. A lot of sports films suffer from Hoosiers syndrome, the big buildup in which adversity yields to triumph; King Richard is no exception, though it gets the racism right. We see Richard meet polite rejection–racism with a smile–as he sought professionals to help his daughters receive the same advantages as white girls. We watch Richard try hard to keep himself and his family safe and out of trouble in a neighborhood marked by drugs, gangs, and guns. Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal) took a chance, sponsored their move to Florida and into a new life. You know the rest.

 

The film skirts or merely mentions a lot of controversy. It shows Richard as obsessed and pigheaded, which most insiders say was so. He also thought he knew better than anyone else. He deserves kudos for making sure his brood–Venus and Serena were his biological daughters but he also helped raise three that Oracene had with her first husband–got to be kids first. I can’t comment on the veracity of those who said he wasn’t the coaching genius he fancied himself or that he wasn’t the shrewd bargainer the film depicts. The film hints that Oracene was more instrumental in the latter.

 

If Althea Gibson was the Jackie Robinson of tennis for Black women, Venus Williams was its Michael Jordan. Her success made from age 14 on made it cool and possible for other Black girls to bring color to center court. She has won 49 titles to date, though at age 41 and many injuries she is now ranked #407 in a sport in which most tour players are about half her age. With 23 Grand Slam titles, Serena is arguably the greatest female tennis star in history. * (At age 40 she is ranked #224, but she picks her tournaments and thus doesn’t rack up ranking points.)

 

It's a wonderful story, but merely a middling film. I’ll just come and say that Will Smith gave a good performance, but not one worthy of the Best Actor Oscar he was given. Both Ellis, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and young Sidney were far more deserving of honors than he. In my view, Smith didn’t warrant a nomination let alone the hardware.

 

At 145 minutes King Richard suffers from being too long. Zach Baylin’s script sheds too much light on Richard and comes close to deifying him. His role was important, but let us not forget that his was reflected glory. Serena is a near afterthought and the inference is that she was several years, not one, younger than Venus. I can’t help but think that a film titled The Williams Sisters with Richard in a supporting role would have been a much stronger film. Credit, though, to cinematographer Robert Elswit for making the tennis look like actual tennis, even if the power of pre-teen Venus was enhanced a bit.

 

Overall, King Richard is a quintessential 3 of 5 movie, worthwhile but not a classic.

 

Rob Weir

 

*FYI, the debate is whether the greatest female tennis champion is Serena or Martina Navratilova. Flip a coin.