Denzel Washington (2016)

Fences is one of the ten plays that comprise August Wilson’s ‘Century Cycle’ (also known as the ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’), each of which explores black American experience in a different decade of the twentieth century.  Most of the action of Fences takes place in 1957, the final scene seven years later.  This places the piece chronologically sixth in the Century Cycle in terms of historical setting.  In terms of date of first public performance the sequence is very different:  for example, Gem of the Ocean, the 1900s piece, wasn’t staged until 2003, making it the last but one of the plays to premiere.   After a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in 1983, Fences was produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 and premiered on Broadway in 1987 – only the second of the Century Cycle plays to do so, after the 1920s-set Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.  The first Broadway production of Fences won, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tonys for Best New Play, Best Actor (James Earl Jones) and Best Featured Actress (Mary Alice).

Fences repeated the Tony hat-trick when it returned to Broadway in 2010, winning Best Revival of a Play and acting awards for Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, in the roles that Jones and Alice had played in the 1987-88 run.  August Wilson died five years before the Broadway revival but he had written a screenplay for a potential film of Fences.  This has now materialised, directed by as well as starring Denzel Washington, and with Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Mykelti Williamson and Russell Hornsby also reprising the roles they played on stage in 2010.  At the start of the Q&A that followed the BFI’s preview showing of Fences, Viola Davis was congratulated on the acclaim and awards her performance in the film is receiving.  Davis modestly replied that it was reward enough for her that Fences had made it to the screen.  I’m sure she meant what she said but Fences is an overlong (139-minute), mostly unsatisfactory movie that achieves distinction only in Davis’s great acting.

The protagonist Troy Maxson (Washington) is a Pittsburgh refuse collector in his mid-fifties.   Rose (Davis), his wife of eighteen years, is the mother of Troy’s younger, teenage son Cory (Jovan Adepo).  The three of them live in the Pittsburgh suburbs.  Troy’s older work colleague and long-time friend Jim Bono (Henderson) and brother Gabe (Williamson) are frequent visitors to the Maxson home; Lyons (Hornsby), Troy’s son from a pre-Rose relationship, puts in more occasional appearances there.  Gabe sustained a head injury in World War II, which left him mentally impaired and with $3000 compensation, money used by Troy to purchase the family home.  A figure of fun to the local kids, Gabe still lives nearby until, around halfway through Fences, he’s taken into institutional care.  Lyons, now in his mid thirties, still hankers after a career as a musician and doesn’t have a regular job.  He turns up to borrow money from his disapproving father or to cadge a meal from his ever-hospitable stepmother.

Troy is a reliable wage-earner – early in the story he’s promoted, becoming the only employee of colour on the local authority workforce to drive a waste collection truck – but he comes from a troubled background and he’s a bitter man.  Mistreated and rejected by his father, Troy took to crime as a teenager and served time for a self-defence killing.  On his release from prison, he became a successful baseball player in the professional Negro Leagues but his ethnicity prevented his graduation to Major League Baseball.  (His sporting prime was in the 1930s:  Jackie Robinson, whose name is mentioned at one point, became the first African American to break the Major League colour bar in 1947.)   Cory’s enthusiasm for football is a major source of tension between him and his father:  although he scornfully tells his son that continuing racial discrimination will stymie any prospects of an NFL future, Troy is more fearful that Cory may be able to succeed where he could not.

Rose has asked Troy to build a fence round the house.  This turns out, not unexpectedly, to be a lengthy and heavily symbolic enterprise.  As Jim Bono tells Troy:

‘Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in.  Rose wants to hold on to you all.  She loves you.’

The fence, from Troy’s perspective, represents the obstacles he came up against as a sportsman, the barriers he’s created between himself and his sons, and a means of keeping the Grim Reaper at a distance.  As a youngster, Troy was seriously ill with pneumonia and won a close fight with death; the (virtually personified) Reaper promised a return bout.  The pivotal moment in Fences comes when Troy tells Rose he’s going to be a father again.  Alberta, the (unseen) younger woman with whom he’s having an affair, then dies in childbirth.  Rose agrees to look after the new baby girl but tells her husband that he’s ‘without a woman’ from now on.   They continue to live together, but sexually estranged, within the family home, where the fence has now been erected.  In a showdown with Cory, Troy provokes his younger son into insulting him as an ‘old man’ and threatening him with the father’s prized possession, his baseball bat.  Troy grabs the bat, overpowers and humiliates Cory, and sends him packing.   Revitalised by this show of strength, Troy swings the bat, challenging the Grim Reaper too to take him on … Seven years later, Troy has died suddenly of a heart attack and the family gathers at the house for his funeral.

Fences is the third feature that Denzel Washington has directed after Antwone Fisher (2002) and The Great Debaters (2007), in both of which he also played the lead.  I’ve not seen either but Washington’s direction of Fences, his first experience of bringing a stage play to the screen, is uncertain and ineffective.  He doesn’t decide if he’s making a motion picture or a filmed record of a feted theatre production.  The opening sequence, which features a conversation between Troy and Bono at work and sees them sitting either side of the back of a garbage truck, moves visually as well as verbally.  The two men then return to Troy’s home.  They walk up the street, into the back yard – and the no man’s land in which most of the rest of the film takes place.  Washington realises he has to keep the camera somewhat active but its movement often seems arbitrary, closing up on an actor’s face when what they’re saying doesn’t warrant such attention.  There are occasions when the spatial distances involved are at odds with the way lines are delivered:  Rose speaks without raising her voice to Troy, who’s approaching the house from some way away; Troy calls with cupped hands to Bono when the latter, although walking away from him, is still well within earshot.   The unrealism of moments like these is much easier to overlook in the essential unreality of a stage set.   It’s perhaps intentional, even if not coherent, that the actors are sometimes positioned so as to create a tableau effect.  When they materialise in the middle of a real street looking as if they’ve arrived there from the wings, it seems merely a mistake.  The street’s reality also draws attention to the complete invisibility and silence of the Maxsons’ neighbours.

August Wilson’s dialogue may be naturally problematic for a film audience because it’s stage rather than movie writing – it’s doubly problematic when it comes over as forced or overwrought stage writing.  The central symbolism of the fence is obvious enough but it’s easier to take than Troy’s monologue on life-as-a-baseball-game.  The clumsiness of this – the improbability of a man like Troy using a metaphor of this kind – isn’t redeemed by Rose’s eventual interrupting him with ‘We ain’t talking about baseball’.  Wilson’s stagecraft is creaky in the last and particularly protracted scene.  Cory, who left home to join the marines, returns unexpectedly, in uniform, for his father’s funeral.  He then tells Rose he won’t be going to the church service.  It’s possible that Cory arrives intending to attend the funeral but, back in the house full of memories of his unhappy relationship with Troy, can’t face the prospect.  If so, Jovan Adepo doesn’t manage to suggest this; and if Cory didn’t intend to go along, why come back at all, when Rose evidently wasn’t expecting to see him?  The crisis is as easily resolved as it’s engineered.  Once Rose has told Cory she brought him up better than for him to miss his own father’s funeral, she’s so confident that her words will have the desired effect that she doesn’t even bother to ask if he’s changed his mind.  He does, of course – in the process of gradually joining his little half-sister Raynell (Saniyya Simpson), Alberta’s daughter, in her singing of a song that Troy used to sing.

During the BFI Q&A, Viola Davis said the play script and screenplay of Fences were close to identical.  The combination of August Wilson’s eminence and the posthumous filming of his screenplay may have deterred the film-makers, out of respect, from editing what Wilson wrote.  Whether or not that’s the case, there are too many words, especially from Troy.   In the theatre, the actors’ momentum may have built intensity, and concentration on the part of the audience, enough to overcome this difficulty.  On screen, the camera’s attention, along with your own, keeps wandering when Troy is sounding off.    (This experience is one of the more realistic aspects of Fences:  it’s like being actually on the receiving end of a determined monologuist, tuning in and out of what they say, nodding or murmuring assent every so often to reassure them you’re listening.)  I found Denzel Washington’s Troy a problem in other ways too.  During that interminable last scene, Rose tells Cory that Troy was ‘so big he seemed to fill the house’ (and took up her space).  Washington is tall and a star presence.  He’s put on weight for the part (although the excessive width of his backside suggests padding); yet he isn’t ‘big’ in the way Rose describes Troy.  In order to be sympathetic, Troy needs to seem at the mercy of teeming impulses and resentments. Washington’s natural aura of intelligent control and his well-groomed look (unkemptness doesn’t come easily to him) get in the way of this happening.   Troy is a self-justifying tyrant but he comes across as a bore too, a man excessive only in his loquaciousness.  Denzel Washington shows formidable histrionic skill and, given how much he has to say, commendable vocal variety but it’s a relief when Troy has died – and not just because you feel his family might be happier without him.  (It’s right enough that none of them, even the seven-year-old Raynell, seems grief-stricken on the day of Troy’s funeral.)

Denzel Washington may have wanted his cast to repeat as much as recreate their Broadway performances but this is easier said than done for Russell Hornsby and Mykelti Williamson, though for different reasons.  Hornsby, who’s forty-two, looks too old as Lyons:  the repeated references to Troy’s elder son’s age – thirty-four – serve only to underline this.  Hornsby also looks too natty:  I wish I believed there was a like-father-like-son calculation at work here.  (It should be said that Washington, although he’s now turned sixty, doesn’t look too old as fifty-three-year-old Troy.)   Mykelti Williamson is saddled with an impossible character:  the benign crackpot Gabe, chasing off hellhounds and presenting Rose with a rose each time he calls, is an incorrigibly stagy conception.

Stephen McKinley Henderson is expert as Bono but Fences would be a poor show without Viola Davis.   She has a couple of advantages.  Rose keeps her verbal powder dry for longer than Troy.  Unlike the men generally, who stand or sit and talk, Davis can tell us a lot about the woman she’s playing – including the fact that she’s got used to keeping quiet – as Rose goes about her homemaking business, especially in the kitchen.  It’s beautifully expressive naturalistic acting.  Not even familiarity with her work in The Help prepares you, however, for Davis’s emotional power when Troy tells Rose about Alberta and the baby she’s expecting.  This is a remarkable rupturing of the register of the uninspired film you’ve been watching for the preceding hour or so:  there were times I’d been bored to tears then I was suddenly moved to tears.  Yet the outburst feels like a natural development of the character of Rose.  Davis is acting with all she’s got but she’s not overacting:  everything in her voice, face and body is generated from inside and it’s utterly true.  She stays true, in spite of the awkwardness and improbability of the plotting and of some of what Rose is given to say.

Plenty of people thought Viola Davis should have won the Best Actress Oscar for The Help; others that Aibileen Clark wasn’t, in terms of screen time, a lead role and that, if Davis had been campaigned for Best Supporting Actress instead, she, rather than her co-star Octavia Spencer, would have won that award.  The part of Rose Maxson raises similar complications:  whereas Mary Alice had won a Tony for Best Featured Actress, Davis was Best Actress for Fences on Broadway.  It seemed to be assumed that she would be contending for Best Actress for the film version too until the announcement in autumn last year that she would be for-your-consideration in the supporting category.  Taking no chances is hardly the right phrase but Viola Davis looks a pretty safe bet to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Fences.  (Her main opposition seems to be Michelle Williams, who, marvellous though she is in Manchester by the Sea, is playing a relatively very small part.)

There was plenty of whooping and PC fandom in evidence at the post-screening Q&A at BFI but Davis managed to be graciously discriminating, as well as entertaining.  When an elderly man thanked her, telling her she reminded him of his mother, Davis thanked him back and added, wryly but kindly, ‘I’ll take that as a compliment’.  Asked if Troy Maxson’s behaviour as a husband and father disparages black love and family life (or words to that effect), Viola Davis recognised that neither Troy’s unhappy upbringing nor his domestic tyranny was an exclusively African-American phenomenon.   She made a judicious suggestion:  ‘I think I might take the ‘black’ out of that statement …’

14 January 2017