Fences (15.)
Directed by Denzel Washington.
Starring Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Russell Hornsby, Jovan Adepo and Mykelti Williamson. 139 mins
The miracle of Denzel Washington is that he has managed to remain a major movie actor and a major movie star without doing the things required of all the other major movie actors and stars. He doesn't go off and make films with Spielberg and Scorsese, and rarely makes Oscar Pleaders. He doesn't appear in the giant super hero, action, sci-fi franchises. Instead he concentrates on playing cops and Ordinary Joe heroes in the kind of medium range projects that all the other stars struggle to get audiences into. He does do the occasional remake but doesn't do sequels (or didn't – Equalizer 2 is being prepared.) He doesn't do much theatre but when he does it's either Shakespeare or a 20th Century classic. Here he has decided to indulge himself a little by putting on film a record of one of his stage triumphs – his 2010 performance in a revival of August Wilson's Fences, effectively the black American equivalent of Death of a Salesman.
He directs too, and his approach to filming the play is effectively to keep it as stagebound as possible. Watching the film you can see what the set was like on stage, where each act would end and, with a little imagination, the curtain coming down between them. They should've included a couple of intervals to really complete the recreation of going to a theatre. In 1950s Pittsburgh, Troy (Washington) works the garbage trucks with his buddy Bono (Henderson) and every Friday night after getting paid they will drink a bottle of gin in the backyard of the house that he shares with his wife Rose (Davis) and he will tell stories about the past, and how he could've been a great baseball player if it hadn't been for the colour bar. The marriage is strong but the relationships with the sons, one of whom plays guitar and the other has been offered a college scholarship to play football, is more strained, with the father projecting his own frustrations onto them.
It is, of course, a big old bunch of yakking and speechifying and in places all a bit hokey on the big screen. Skeletons will be drawn from cupboards and assumptions will be undermined. It is all in the rhythm of the language which captures that of everyday speech while giving it a sense of poetry. This kind of dialogue is high grade thespian gasoline and you can see how it powers the performers but when they get to one of the big emotional showdowns and Troy starts trying to explain himself in long winded baseball metaphors you might despair of it all. The moment, half an hour in, we get to meet Troy's backward brother Gabriel (Williamson), who would be described as being “touched” in the language of the times as he has a plate in his head after getting part of his head blown off in WWII, is the one when I felt inclined to wipe my hands of the whole affair, but it won me round. In one sense it is a long time watching very little, but as the minutes move past, as the scenes change and we pass down through the years, it loads up a mighty cumulative power.
The acting is ultimately the thing, and Washington is, of course, magnificent, though not necessarily any more magnificent than he is playing a cop, or a bank robber or a heroic train engineer. It's easy to excel with juicy speeches to bite into, less so when you're trying to inject some human truth and realism into a Tony Scott magic hour shafts-of-low-sunlight-through-the-shutters piece of nonsense. The role of Troy was originally played by James Earl Jones and you'd imagine Jones's more ambiguous and volatile presence to be a more obvious fit. With Washington there is always that inherent sense of decency, and though that is an interesting thing to play against, I suspect it may make audiences too forgiving of Troy. Opposite him, Viola Davies is more than a match for him and in their big emotional showdown she doesn't just open up the waterworks but lets loose with the nasal snot production line too. She is very precious about her phlegm; she won't be spraying it around in Suicide Squad, she reserves it for films of plays.
Directed by Denzel Washington.
Starring Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Russell Hornsby, Jovan Adepo and Mykelti Williamson. 139 mins
The miracle of Denzel Washington is that he has managed to remain a major movie actor and a major movie star without doing the things required of all the other major movie actors and stars. He doesn't go off and make films with Spielberg and Scorsese, and rarely makes Oscar Pleaders. He doesn't appear in the giant super hero, action, sci-fi franchises. Instead he concentrates on playing cops and Ordinary Joe heroes in the kind of medium range projects that all the other stars struggle to get audiences into. He does do the occasional remake but doesn't do sequels (or didn't – Equalizer 2 is being prepared.) He doesn't do much theatre but when he does it's either Shakespeare or a 20th Century classic. Here he has decided to indulge himself a little by putting on film a record of one of his stage triumphs – his 2010 performance in a revival of August Wilson's Fences, effectively the black American equivalent of Death of a Salesman.
He directs too, and his approach to filming the play is effectively to keep it as stagebound as possible. Watching the film you can see what the set was like on stage, where each act would end and, with a little imagination, the curtain coming down between them. They should've included a couple of intervals to really complete the recreation of going to a theatre. In 1950s Pittsburgh, Troy (Washington) works the garbage trucks with his buddy Bono (Henderson) and every Friday night after getting paid they will drink a bottle of gin in the backyard of the house that he shares with his wife Rose (Davis) and he will tell stories about the past, and how he could've been a great baseball player if it hadn't been for the colour bar. The marriage is strong but the relationships with the sons, one of whom plays guitar and the other has been offered a college scholarship to play football, is more strained, with the father projecting his own frustrations onto them.
It is, of course, a big old bunch of yakking and speechifying and in places all a bit hokey on the big screen. Skeletons will be drawn from cupboards and assumptions will be undermined. It is all in the rhythm of the language which captures that of everyday speech while giving it a sense of poetry. This kind of dialogue is high grade thespian gasoline and you can see how it powers the performers but when they get to one of the big emotional showdowns and Troy starts trying to explain himself in long winded baseball metaphors you might despair of it all. The moment, half an hour in, we get to meet Troy's backward brother Gabriel (Williamson), who would be described as being “touched” in the language of the times as he has a plate in his head after getting part of his head blown off in WWII, is the one when I felt inclined to wipe my hands of the whole affair, but it won me round. In one sense it is a long time watching very little, but as the minutes move past, as the scenes change and we pass down through the years, it loads up a mighty cumulative power.
The acting is ultimately the thing, and Washington is, of course, magnificent, though not necessarily any more magnificent than he is playing a cop, or a bank robber or a heroic train engineer. It's easy to excel with juicy speeches to bite into, less so when you're trying to inject some human truth and realism into a Tony Scott magic hour shafts-of-low-sunlight-through-the-shutters piece of nonsense. The role of Troy was originally played by James Earl Jones and you'd imagine Jones's more ambiguous and volatile presence to be a more obvious fit. With Washington there is always that inherent sense of decency, and though that is an interesting thing to play against, I suspect it may make audiences too forgiving of Troy. Opposite him, Viola Davies is more than a match for him and in their big emotional showdown she doesn't just open up the waterworks but lets loose with the nasal snot production line too. She is very precious about her phlegm; she won't be spraying it around in Suicide Squad, she reserves it for films of plays.
