MENDING FENCES
Film’s racial themes remain relevant
Here’s an odd double-time-warp: When August Wilson’s play Fences premiered on Broadway in 1987 with James Earl Jones starring, its late-’50s setting was about 30 years in the past. It’s now been an additional 30 since the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play debuted. Yet the themes of black lives feel just as relevant today. That’s either great writing or poor social progress. More likely a combination of the two.
The filmed adaptation also feels very much like a play. That isn’t necessarily bad, and it’s to be expected when you recall that the director and star, Denzel Washington, and his co-star Viola Davis, acted in a 2010 Broadway run of Fences, winning a Tony each for acting, as well as one for best revival.
But it does mean we’re reminded at every character entrance and exit that this was originally intended for the stage. As filmmaker, Washington has chosen to open up the film only briefly — the beginning, for instance, finds his character, Troy Maxson, out on the streets of Pittsburgh, where he works as a garbage collector, railing against the fact that the drivers are white, while the coloureds do all the heavy lifting. (He doesn’t often use the term “coloured,” but we’re not going to print his preferred term for blacks.)
Most of the rest of the action takes place in Troy’s small house and even smaller backyard, where his planned construction of a fence is delayed time and again by his habit of yakking. He is, admittedly, very good at this, to the point where you could almost close your eyes and imagine this to be a radio play.
Ah, but then you’d miss much of Davis’s quiet, soulful performance as Rose, Troy’s oh-sopatient wife. One senses that he talked his way into her life, and as the play — sorry, movie — progresses we learn that she was neither the first nor the last to succumb to his loquacious charms. Davis is a cinch to win an Oscar, the only flaw being that the studio has put her forward in the best supporting category. She won her Tony for a leading performance, and this is definitely a leading role.
Troy is joined from time to time by a handful of other important people in his life. There’s Stephen Henderson as Bono, his best friend and workmate. Russell Hornsby plays Lyons, Troy’s son from a former relationship, who maintains just enough closeness with his father to know when payday is and to come around asking for a loan. Mykelti Williamson is Gabriel, Troy’s brother, not right in the head since being wounded in the war.
But the key character in his life is Cory, played with admirable stillness by Jovan Adepo. Cory is the teenaged son of Troy and Rose, and has just enough of his father’s physicality to register as a threat to the old man. Troy feels cheated that he came along too early to have played majorleague baseball like Jackie Robinson. When Cory starts talking about a football scholarship, his dad can’t believe “the white man” will ever let his son make his way in the world on athletic talent alone.
These characters revolve around Troy like minor planets, as he batters them with flares of contention, and holds them in orbit with the gravity of his personality. He isn’t an evil man per se, but he has done wrong in the past, and one senses he could still, until age renders him toothless — and mid-century bluecollars grew so old so fast.
Fences has been compared to — or positioned as a response to — Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and there is much to be gleaned about the AfricanAmerican experience in its wordy structure. Wilson, who wrote the screenplay before he died in 2005, was adamant that only a black director could properly bring the play to the screen.
Yet for all its wisdom, the presentation sometimes feels a bit too polished, more like a museum-worthy diorama of race in America than a living, breathing portrayal. There is also the matter of an awkward coda, set seven years after the main body of story. This too is drawn from the play, and it sends the movie out at its stagiest — one almost expects Washington and Davis to do a curtain call.
But the play’s the thing wherein we hear our consciences ring. Washington has brought Wilson’s work to a larger audience than would have seen the live theatrical performance, and for that alone deserves great credit.