I've been off this week tapping away on this and that. I should be posting for the rest of the week and then back to normal come Monday.
Tonight I watched KING RICHARD, the Will Smith-led biopic of Venus and Serena Williams' dad. It's very worth watching just as an example of how to do a biopic. The craft is really clean.
But the thing that really leapt out to me was the way it ends. Of course there's going to be a big match: this is a sports movie, that's what you do. In this case, Act III is Venus' first professional tournament. She won the first game, and so now she's up against the world champion.
And there's a sort of twist in that Venus is way ahead when her opponent calls a timeout (or whatever they do in tennis) and just walks off the court for like ten minutes or more. It's clearly in part a maneuver meant to mess with Venus' head (and give Act III some bigger stakes). And it totally works; Venus is completely off her game once they resume, loses the second set and struggles in the third.
As I'm watching it, I'm assuming of course she's going to win in the end. That's how Richard's whole plan-for-the-girls strategy is validated, after all. If she loses, what was it all for?
But then, SHE DOES LOSE. And yet it still works--in fact, it works better--because while Richard did have this 78 page plan for the girls' training, as the movie has gone on what we've learned is that the plan is not just about becoming great tennis players but about becoming happy human beings. Time and again we see Richard refusing opportunities for the girls specifically because he's trying to protect them.
So Venus losing is actually not the worst thing that can happen. In fact, as Richard and Oracene comfort Venus, they provide this entirely different take on the game. This was not a failure, but a massive and incredible success. In her first professional tournament she took the world champion to the final set, and she did it with incredible poise. They've never been prouder, Richard tells Venus.
It's a fantastic example of that Holy Grail of screenwriting, an ending that is completely unexpected and yet in its own inevitable. From a script perspective it's Venus winning that would fail to validate Richard's system. It's in her failure that we see what's actually important. (By the way, Saniyya Sidney as Venus is just fantastic. She and Demi Singleton and the three other women playing their sisters are all marvelous.)
And the thing that makes it especially stand out is that writer Zach Baylin has found a way to separate the unexpected and inevitable into two separate moments. It makes the a-ha we get from the parents' scene with Venus so much more thrilling because we didn't see it coming.
I take these three questions as takeaways from KING RICHARD: 1) What is my character's ultimate goal? Richard's is not tennis. It's happiness for his kids. Tennis is actually in a way the distraction, the thing Baylin wants our eye on so he can surprise us. 2) How does the ending of my feature answer that ultimate goal? 3) Is there a way to put a twist on that ending so that the answer is somehow a surprise?
Not every script can land as well as KING RICHARD does. But the biggest part of the challenge of that is not coming up with a big twist at the end. No, it's about sanding away at our sense of our character's ultimate goal--the thing that's guiding them from the beginning--until it's as clean and clear as possible.
When that's the case, their choices all along the way and the options for the ending become so much clearer.
