Maiken Baird and Michelle Major take an unfiltered look into the busy lives of Venus and Serena Williams, the greatest sister-act professional tennis has ever seen. From in-depth interviews with family and friends to home videos of their life in Compton, California, Venus and Serena takes you behind the glamour and prestige, opening your eyes to a career of heartache and joy, pain and celebration, showing you that while their lives have been a pioneer for the sport, they were always meant for greatness.
While I've never been a huge fan of professional tennis, I haven't been living under a rock for the past decade either. I've watched the Williams sisters take hold of the sport, triumphing on nearly every stage as they became two of the biggest names in women's sport. But with that came the negative"”most noticeably from the media as both women became leading targets for the media.
What impressed me most about Venus and Serena was the access. Full interviews with family and friends helped to open the lives of these two gladiators, showing us exactly who they are, and most importantly where they had come from. To the casual viewer, their rise to dominance was quick and unexpected, but for those who know the sport and the Williams family, the journey was much more painful than that.
The film, in its limited runtime of just over 90 minutes, is able to hit on several points but spends most of its time detailing the two in terms of tennis and one another. Minimal focus is put on their fashion careers and even less on their personal lives, but directors Baird and Major are able to use their personal footage from the 2011 tennis season to creatively intertwine both past and present and give us a small glimpse into who these two women really are.
The most eye opening aspect came with their training, their injuries, and their age in retrospect to their competition. I had never fully understood just how young the sport is, and hearing about their decade long domination is hard to fully comprehend. Venus and Serena does put a lot of focus on the racial element of their success, and while I do fully understand the important of their success in relation to African American athletes everywhere, I felt that the over emphasis on this took away from their courage and determination as female athletes.
The final result offers up an inspirational story of overcoming odds and looking opposition in the eyes, but it likely would have been better suited as a television special. A few words would have been bleeped out, but I constantly felt as if I was watching a well edited and creatively directed '30 for 30' film on ESPN. Nothing wrong with that, I'm just not convinced that the final product is worth the price of admission.
