Malcolm Washington (2024)
It seems that screen versions of August Wilson’s ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’ plays will be appearing once every four years: after Fences (2016) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) comes The Piano Lesson, now showing at the London Film Festival. Denzel Washington directed and starred in Fences; The Piano Lesson involves two generations of the Washington family. Denzel produced, as he did on the two earlier films; his elder son, John David, has a starring role; his younger son, Malcolm, is behind the camera – directing his first cinema feature and sharing the screenplay credit, with Virgil Williams. Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle comprises ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century. The Piano Lesson is the 1930s play but Malcolm Washington’s adaptation blurs this identity through repeated flashbacks to events seminal to the story that occurred in 1911. This use of flashback betrays a larger anxiety on the film-makers’ part – as to how ‘cinematic’ Wilson’s theatre pieces need to be when they’re turned into screen drama.
Fences, though indecisive in this respect, mostly felt stagy. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which opened up Wilson’s play only occasionally, made a dramatic virtue of restricting the action to one place: the confines of the recording studio served to increase claustrophobic tension. The Piano Lesson, though more visually and sonically dynamic than either of these predecessors, is hamstrung by the same kind of uncertainty that plagued Fences. Although the Washington brothers and others involved in the film, speaking on the Royal Festival Hall stage ahead of this screening, made clear their reverent admiration for August Wilson, that uncertainty, in effect, does him a disservice. When, for example, Samuel L Jackson’s Doaker Charles recounts what happened twenty-five years ago, Malcolm Washington cuts away to show on the screen what Doaker is describing; on the soundtrack, Jackson’s voice is accompanied by Alexandre Desplat’s (undistinguished) music. It seems clear that, on stage, Wilson’s words and their delivery, in combination with the reactions of the characters listening to those words, are all that’s needed to make Doaker’s account dramatically powerful. Washington’s visual and other aids, as well as relegating the importance of Doaker’s voice, dilute that power.
Like Fences, The Piano Lesson relies centrally on a symbolic object but this one is freighted with richer cultural and moral meaning. In 1936 Doaker Charles is the head of a Pittsburgh household whose living room contains a piano, decorated with the carved faces of the family’s ancestors, who were slaves on a Mississippi plantation. The piano originally belonged to the slave owner, Sutter, who bought it as a present for his wife. In order to do so, he broke up a family by selling two of his slaves, a mother and her child, to raise funds. Mrs Sutter enjoyed the piano but missed these two slaves; Sutter had his Black carpenter carve their likenesses on the piano. The carpenter, who was also husband and father to the two sold slaves, was Doaker’s great uncle. While the Sutter family was enjoying Fourth of July celebrations in 1911, Doaker’s brother and an accomplice stole the piano from the plantation house.
Doaker now shares his home with his widowed niece, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), and her eleven-year-old daughter, Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith). It was Berniece’s father who stole the piano from the Sutters. Her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), and his pal, Lymon (Ray Fisher), arrive from Mississippi, where both have recently served time in prison. A sharecropper, Boy Willie means to better himself by buying the land on which his forebears were slaves. He wants to sell the piano to help him do that. Berniece, although she no longer plays the piano, is implacably opposed to the idea. The conflicts arising from their opposing points of view – move on from your family history versus never forget it – are the heart of The Piano Lesson, in which the ‘ghosts’ of the past feature prominently. Sutter’s dead body was found at the bottom of a well and Berniece accuses her brother of putting him there. She and Maretha, who has been taught to play the piano though not told about its provenance, both see the ghost of Sutter (Jay Peterson) in the Pittsburgh house. Regular visitors there also include Wining Boy (Michael Potts), another of Doaker’s brothers and the closest relation to a comedy character in the story; and Avery Brown (Corey Hawkins), an upstanding preacher and Berniece’s hopeful suitor – although he finds her as reluctant to abandon the memory of her late, much-loved husband as she is to dispose of the piano.
The film’s star turn is unquestionably Danielle Deadwyler. I wasn’t among the many who thought her outrageously overlooked for an Oscar nomination for her work in Till (2022) but Deadwyler deserves one for The Piano Lesson. This is acting-your-socks-off acting, to be sure, but as Berniece she shows impressive range and control, and real depth. John David Washington’s Boy Willie, although vigorous, isn’t quite as volatile as the set-up and storyline suggest he needs to be. Washington had played the role in the latest (2022) Broadway production of The Piano Lesson, whose cast also included Samuel L Jackson, Ray Fisher and Michael Potts. Jackson is, of course, by far the most experienced screen actor in the film’s cast, and it shows. He knows how little you often need to be doing (or seem to be doing) on camera, in order to be doing more than enough. This doesn’t always, though, give him the prominence he deserves. As already noted, Malcolm Washington denies Jackson what should surely be his highlight moment, when he tells the story of the piano’s theft and its aftermath. More generally, his relatively subtle playing makes less histrionic impact than some of the louder performances going on around him.
The high volume is sometimes a bit much. One quarrel about the piano is so noisily prolonged that when tearful, fearful Maretha suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, you can’t understand why she hasn’t been disturbed sooner – and, especially, why it hasn’t occurred to Berniece what effect the argy-bargy must be having on the child that she’s so anxious to protect. Malcolm Washington has a sure touch, though, both in directing Skylar Aleece Smith, who’s excellent, and in handling Berniece’s romantic scenes. Ray Fisher’s portrait of awkward, simple Lymon, which sometimes seems designed for the upper circle in a theatre, comes into its own when Lymon dabs perfume on Berniece’s neck: he and Danielle Deadwyler make this exchange really affecting. Deadwyler is good, too, in conveying Berniece’s almost guilty inability to respond to the righteous but unappealing Avery. She does ask him, though, to bless the house with a view to exorcising Sutter’s ghost. Washington gives this climactic sequence the all-stops-out treatment: the supernatural fireworks earned a round of audience applause in the Festival Hall but they’re a forced spectacle.
Other than in the flashbacks and when Boy Willie and Lymon first test its weight, the eponymous instrument stays put. Berniece eventually wins the argument, while also coming to understand that she must resume playing the piano – and that her daughter must keep on playing it – in recognition of their ancestors. Boy Willie, though he accepts defeat, heads back to Mississippi warning that if they don’t play the piano, he’ll return to the household, along with the unquiet ghost of Sutter. The shades of Laurel and Hardy can rest easy, however. Their efforts in The Music Box (1932) remain American cinema’s most memorable piano-moving episode.
12 October 2024
