Film review

  • The Piano Lesson

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Blitz

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steve McQueen (2024)

    The third Steve McQueen film chosen to open the London Film Festival, Blitz contrives to be even worse than its red-carpet predecessors, Widows (2018) and Mangrove (2020).  This is by no means the first dramatisation of London life during World War II or even the first with the title Blitz (Lionel Bart’s 1962 stage musical had the added exclamation mark).  McQueen’s effort, which he also wrote, may be the first WW2 film, though, to give screen time to people of colour in early 1940s London.  The material isn’t autobiographical or the story of McQueen’s Grenadian parents, who were part of the Windrush Generation (he was born in 1969); but that hardly explains why Blitz feels so secondhand.  This is the work of someone who has seen plenty of other British films about wartime London – it’s a whistle-stop tour of genre clichés.  McQueen doesn’t subvert those clichés or show them in a new light through the prism of non-white experience.  He just depends on them.

    What’s more distinctive about Blitz, set in 1940, is the technology that a big-budget movie can now bring to bear on the subject.  The film opens with a bang all right – an aerial bombing.  Perhaps McQueen means us to feel what it was actually like to be on the receiving end of one:  the sequence is ear-splittingly loud though regular filmgoers will have heard worse.  McQueen hasn’t introduced any characters at this point so the bodies destroyed in the air-raid pyrotechnics don’t mean much:  they’re CGI components.  The camera eventually goes inside a terraced house in Stepney to reveal a piano and an elderly man playing it (Paul Weller).  But it’s not until McQueen moves upstairs, to a woman and a boy in a bedroom, that Blitz is jolted to life by real people – or that’s how they seem at first.  The woman is white; the boy is mixed race.  She is Rita (Saoirse Ronan); he is her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan), who’ll be Blitz’s protagonist.  When we first see him and his mother, they’re goofing around together on his bed.  Their silly, funny game is interrupted by an air-raid siren.  It’s quickly downstairs and downhill from there.

    Rita, George and Gerald (the piano man, who’s Rita’s father) head with hordes of others for Stepney Green tube station.  An official at the locked entrance insists the place can’t be used as an air-raid shelter; another man in uniform angrily insists that it must be; the crowd rushes through.  George is carrying the family cat in its basket.  As soon as they’re on the underground platform, he opens the basket – I wanted to call out, ‘Don’t be so daft – the cat will run away!’  I admit to an unusual order of priorities when it comes to feline vs human safety but Steve McQueen’s reason for having George open the basket is pretty dubious, too:  it’s so that George, by telling Olly the cat not to be scared, can deliver a bless-his-little-heart moment.  (Olly stays put although he nearly disappears from the film.)  When the family gets back home, Gerald tells Rita they can’t go on like this and she must arrange for her son to be evacuated.  She’s soon seeing him off at a railway station.  George is so furiously reluctant to go that he refuses even to look at his mother as she bangs desperately on the train window – until a railway worker drags her, weeping hysterically, away.

    When George asks her why she can’t come with him, Rita explains that evacuation is an ‘adventure’ for children only.  For a short while, an adventure is what it looks to be.  Two other boys in the same carriage bait George on the train journey but he stands up for himself, then opens the carriage door, flings his small suitcase out and jumps after it.  Case in hand, he starts to make his way back on foot along the rail track.  An approaching train conveniently slows down; George, after removing the sandwich that Rita gave him for the journey, discards his case and hoists himself into the goods van.  There he meets other young evacuees turned escapees; they have great fun on the journey back to London, climbing onto the train roof and so on.  Back in the East End, McQueen introduces other grown-ups in the story:  firefighter Jack (Harris Dickinson), who’s clearly keen on Rita but too shy to say; Tilda (Hayley Squires) and Agnes (Sally Messham), Rita’s pals at the munitions factory where she works.  The women’s supervisor is ineffectually bossy Clive (Joshua McGuire).  The factory gets a visit from a roving radio show that gives talented workers the chance to sing:  Rita is the selected soloist.  The moment she ends her song, another worker dashes to the microphone to make an on-air demand for more underground stations to be available as air-raid shelters:  the plummy BBC voice of the radio show’s host (Alex Jennings) develops a decidedly sharper edge.

    George is hardly back in London before he gets separated from the other kids, and has to try and make his own way home.  Wandering unsurely around Piccadilly Circus, he’s spotted by a kindly ARP warden, who introduces himself as Iffy.  That makes George laugh but Ife (Benjamin Clementine) explains that his name, in the Yoruba language of his native Nigeria, means ‘love’.  George accompanies him on his warden rounds as night falls.  Well-named Ife says he’ll find somewhere for George to sleep and sings him a little song that goes ‘Alleluia … alleluia … alleluia … alleluia’.  A well-mannered air-raid siren waits for the solo to end before sounding.  Ife takes George to a shelter run by a socialist group.  A couple there are nasty to a Sikh man so Ife makes a speech, informing all concerned that they’re equal.  Ife bids George goodnight, telling him he has more rounds to do but that he’ll be back in the morning.  Spoken on screen, those words are a time-honoured kiss of death.  Ife is killed in that night’s air raid.

    Ife isn’t Blitz‘s only non-white adult without flaw; in fact there’s just one, partial exception to the rule.  Next day, as George stares longingly at pastries in a baker’s shop window, the baker shoos him away and makes a racist remark to one of his customers – a bad choice since she’s his only customer of colour.   This is Doris (Erin Kellyman), who calls the baker out and gives him the finger.  Outside, she strikes up a conversation with George, promising him a sandwich in exchange for his name.  Doris isn’t another friend in need, however:  she quickly turns into McQueen’s version of Nancy, taking George to a den of thieves run by Albert (Stephen Graham), a Bill Sikes with evident mental health issues, and Beryl (Kathy Burke), who’s not exactly Fagin but you get the general idea.  Even though this is another element of McQueen’s original screenplay indebted to someone else’s originality, the scenes involving these miscreants are among the film’s best because the gang’s criminal speciality – robbing the dead bodies of bomb victims – is unusual in a wartime London picture.  It’s true that, in order to supply bejewelled corpses, McQueen stages a largely irrelevant set piece:  a sequence in a swanky club, complete with floor show, that’s reduced to rubble in an air raid.  Even so, the follow-up sequence, in which Beryl and Albert nastily imitate the posh accents of deceased diners as they relieve them of their watches and necklaces, has macabre verve – thanks to McQueen’s images, as well as to Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke.

    For the most part, though, Blitz presents an overwhelmingly traditional portrait of wartime East Enders.  The film’s attitude towards local whites is hardly less benign than it is to the few people of colour in their midst – and a much more serious defect.  Hearts of gold and spunk virtually eclipse racism.  The white bigots are the few rotten apples in the barrel.  They arrive in the film then vanish from it within a matter of seconds.  This relieves McQueen of the specific problem of a significant character who’s also a racist, as well as the larger challenge of acknowledging that the same white person in this kind of wartime community might well have shown both admirable fortitude and virulent racial prejudice.  There’s a flashback to the incident with white thugs that sees George’s father (CJ Beckford) dragged away by the police (never to be seen again).  In the local pub, Jack’s fireman colleague makes a racist remark that Rita overhears; when she storms out, thoroughly decent Jack tells the other fireman not to say such silly things.  Rita is a white single mother with a mixed-race child.  There’s no suggestion that either her lack of husband or her son’s ethnicity has ever caused tension in her home or workplace relationships.  (You wonder what a man of her father’s generation feels about it:  does McQueen think he has dealt with this by having Gerald lead a family singalong to Fats Waller’s ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’?)   It’s astonishing to see the maker of 12 Years a Slave (2013) and the Small Axe series indulge in such sentimental evasion.

    Parts of Blitz just don’t make sense.  When Rita learns from representatives of the child evacuation services, who visit the munitions factory, that her son has disappeared she’s angry rather than shocked or incredulous.  When she gets home and can’t sit still for worry, she says she’s going out to look for George.  You might expect her father to say something like, ‘I know you’re upset but think about it:  where are you going to look?’  Not a bit of it:  Gerald says, ‘I’ll come with you’ (his daughter tells him to stay at home so there’s someone in if George turns up there).  It remains unclear where Rita does go looking.  After George has escaped the corpse-robbers (which he does very easily), he ends up spending the night in another tube station – London Bridge this time.  A German bomb destroys a water main and the station is flooded (an event presumably inspired by the flood at Balham underground station in 1940 – as featured in Atonement (2007), which McQueen has also no doubt seen).  George gets out, contacts the emergency services and wakes up next morning in a comfy bed in a terraced house.  A middle-aged woman (Heather Craney) brings him a cup of tea and tells him what a hero he is:  if it hadn’t been for George, she says, many more would have died in the station flood.  This woman is so emphatically nice that you know there’s something fishy about her.  Sure enough, as George is getting dressed, he hears her open the front door to two policemen:  she tells them – her tone now sinister – that she’ll bring George to the station shortly.  Why?  Is it something to do with his heroism or are the police suddenly interested in a missing evacuee (in which case how has George been identified)?  None of this matters to Steve McQueen.  He simply wants a pretext for George to scarper from the woman’s house and run through Stepney streets back to his own home.

    The plotting is so bad you start to believe anything is possible.  A couple of times, I thought:  surely it can’t be … and it wasn’t – but given some of the other ridiculous things that happen in Blitz, you then end up wondering why not.  The first instance was when George met Ife, and I wondered briefly if this was his long-lost father.  The second instance was odder.  George, alone among the sleepers on the London Bridge platform, wakes up and starts walking along the track.  Entering a tunnel, he hears a woman singing.  Could it be his mother?  When he emerges from the tunnel, he can see she’s wearing a red coat, just like Rita’s.  Once Ife materialises and says hello to George, however, you know this a dream – so it’s rather puzzling that the singer isn’t Rita but just another sweet-voiced woman in a red coat.  The film’s ending confirms that what really happens in Blitz is as hard to swallow as what is imagined.  The street where George lives has been destroyed in an air raid.  We see a policeman carrying Olly the cat but George ignores them.  He speaks unavailingly to his granddad, who lies dead in the rubble of his house, then sees his mother, who runs to embrace her son.  She promises George she’ll never send him away again.  Does McQueen think the evacuation of children from London (evacuation ‘away from London’, as an ill-written opening legend has it) was a bad thing?

    Saoirse Ronan’s authority as an actress is a bit of a problem on this occasion.  Her role is so thinly written that Ronan, for all her intelligence and skill, seems just too big for it – and too classy.  She wears Jacqueline Durran’s outfits with aplomb and looks effortlessly well groomed:  you never believe in Rita as a badly-off woman doing her best to look her best.  Elliot Heffernan does all that’s asked of him; it’s what that often consists of that’s the problem.  Heffernan did, though, provoke my only laugh of pleasure throughout Blitz, when Doris makes the offer of a sandwich and George doesn’t miss a beat before specifying a sausage sandwich.  As Gerald, Paul Weller, making his feature-film acting debut at the age of sixty-six, is OK but there’s a grating sense that McQueen is using him in a semi-symbolic way, vaguely to suggest pop music’s intrinsic egalitarianism.  Harris Dickinson, although he has very little to do, still manages to give Jack some human reality (the pitch of his voice, as well as his Cockney accent, is spot on).  Hayley Squires, despite being at the centre of the nearly obligatory British wartime-movie routine of painting stocking seams onto her legs, is bracingly natural and animated.

    As the casting of Paul Weller implies, McQueen is out to make some social and political statements here and, when he does, does so in ways that ring anachronistically false.  George initially tells Ife that he doesn’t think of himself as Black; after Ife reprimands the racist couple in the overnight shelter, George changes his mind and tells Ife as much.  Mickey Davies, the man who seems to be in charge of the centre, is proudly Jewish as well as socialist and played by Leigh Gill, who’s a dwarf:  when Mickey delivers a speech, its rapturous reception in the shelter sounds like approbation of all three of those things.  Yet McQueen so pussyfoots on the racial realities of the time that his greatest hostility seems to be towards bureaucrats – from the jobsworth at Stepney Green tube station to the two evacuation service reps who deliver the bad news about George to his mother.  In any case, Blitz is repeatedly swamped by the director’s taste for spectacular bomb(l)ast (the narrative ends as it began).  Hans Zimmer’s pompous, meaningless score is a fitting accompaniment to this.  Blitz was the first of nine films I’m due to see at this year’s London Film Festival.  Here’s hoping the only way is up.

    10 October 2024

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