August Wilson. It’s a name that is synonymous with the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. His cycle of 10 plays from “Gem of the Ocean” to “Radio Golf” covers the Black experience in Pittsburgh through the 10 decades of the last century.
The fourth, “The Piano Lesson,” is set in the Pittsburgh of the 1930s.
Boy Willie (John David Washington – “The Creator”) and his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher – “Rebel Moon”) have just arrived in Pittsburgh, having driven a truck full of watermelons up from Mississippi. Their first stop is at Uncle Doaker Charles’s (Samuel L. Jackson – “Pulp Fiction”) house where Boy Willie’s sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler – “Till”) is staying.
Boy Willie has an ulterior reason for stopping at his sister’s: he needs money to buy 100 acres of a recently dead white farmer’s land. He has one-third of the money he needs, selling the watermelons will get him another one-tird, and selling his sister’s piano will get him the last part. However, she has no intention of selling, because the piano has important generational meaning – it was originally owned by the slave-owning Sutters, the descendant of whom owned the 100 acres Boy Willie wants to buy. That piano has the history of the Charles family captured in carvings done by their grandfather. Add the ghost of Sutter, possibly killed by Willie, to the mix and you have a house full of human interaction.
Denzel Washington is one of the producers of this film, which is a family project in that the director/writer is his son Malcolm (“North Hollywood”), and son John plays Boy Willie. This is Malcolm’s feature directorial debut and he handles the actors well, especially in some of the highly emotionally-charged scenes. There are plenty of these, as August Wilson wrote the part of Berniece to be a powerful woman – more powerful and competent than any of the men in the piece. As such, Deadwyler really shines.
Cinematography, editing and music are all excellent, and, thanks to the design of the original play, we are exposed to the ever-present backdrop of black people forced to live in an oppressors’ world, with the inevitable familial misery and distorted relationships that result.
One of the limitations of presenting a play in film form is what to do with the inevitable “staginess” that is inherent in a play but antagonistic to the expansive realm we have come to expect from our movies. Malcolm Washington and co-writer Virgil Williams (“Mudbound”) have added a few fleeting scenes outside the Charles’s modest home to illustrate events referred to in the play, but otherwise we are bound to the somewhat claustrophobic environs of the kitchen and living room of a small house. While true to the source material, it is a visual frustration on screen.
Watch this movie for the human interactions and the powerful Oscar-worthy (but not nominated) performance by Danielle Deadwyler.
Runtime: Two hours, seven minutes – the play ran about 2:20.
Availability: It’s a Netflix production, so …
. . .
Join us on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/itsjustmovies!