We reach, following Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the third chapter in Denzel Washington’s admirable effort, as producer, to get all 10 plays in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle on to big and (this is a Netflix production) small screens.
Malcolm Washington, Denzel’s son, makes his feature debut with a production that, as was the case with its two predecessors, gives a supreme cast room to breathe without satisfactorily shaking off the piece’s stage origins. Once again, the drama hangs around coups de theatre that, interrupting yards of declamatory dialogue, feel too mannered for a more distancing medium. The project increasingly looks as if it is pickling the plays in aspic rather than finding them appropriate cinematic translations.
The Piano Lesson, first staged in 1987, comes complete with thumping titular metaphor. We are in the outskirts of Pittsburgh during the Great Depression. Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), a black widow in middle age, lives in a rural home with her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) and an elaborately decorated upright piano. The action begins with her brother Boy Willy (John David Washington) and his pal Lymon (Ray Fisher) arriving in the middle of the night with a scheme that fails to much move Berniece. It involves the piano.
That instrument bears a symbolic weight that would crush many less sturdy items of household furniture. Decades earlier a local white land owner exchanged it for “one and a half” slaves – the family’s ancestors – before it was snatched by the current owners during (what else?) Fourth of July fireworks. Images of Berniece’s enslaved relatives are carved into the wood, but that doesn’t dissuade Boy Willy from asking if he can sell the piano to buy back the land their ancestors once worked. After all, nobody plays the thing. Chekhov scarcely imposed such dramatic significance on a whole cherry orchard.
The characters therefore approach the conflict between progress and memorial from opposing compass points. Berniece cannot escape tragedies that reach across the generations. Boy Willy is eager to kick all that aside and power into whatever prosperity a racist nation will allow. There is not much sense that he cares about the symbolic value of extracting wealth from the soil his great grandparents bled upon.
Layered above and below is a half-hearted fear of the supernatural. Do they really believe that “ghosts of the Yellow Dog” threw a white plutocrat down a nearby well? Berniece believes enough to consult an amiable clergyman about the possibility of an exorcism.
It feels like damning with faint praise to pick out performances in a production that has difficulties elsewhere, but no compliments are too breathless for Deadwyler’s work. Robbed of an Oscar nomination for Till, in 2023, she will surely be on the grid this year. Nobody else can so compellingly swing from flattened regret to – here embodying centuries of oppression – a wide-eyed passion that causes the rest of the screen to wither into invisibility. Samuel L Jackson, who has never got enough praise for his restraint, offers perfect complement as her disciplined, calming uncle.
The interaction between these fine actors – John David Washington, the director’s brother, continues his rise – keeps the production tasty even as, in later stages, it gives into something like desperation. Up to the last third, mere hints of Gothic horror have worked themselves between the cracks, but the closing sequences, while delivering inevitable discharge of the piano-gun over the fireplace, fully embrace macabre in a fashion that seems plucked from a different genre. Anyone stumbling into the wrong cinema might think themselves in the latest horror from Blumhouse Productions. Oh well. You couldn’t say those scenes were dry or theatrical.
In cinemas from Friday, November 8th, and on Netflix from Friday, November 22nd
