Movie Review: 'Fences'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- For anyone who criticizes the movie version of Fences for remaining too much like the play it started out as, the apt rejoinder would be that that's actually one of its chief pleasures.
Fences takes place mostly in the cramped backyard of a modest brick house in Pittsburgh in the 1950's, where fully developed characters reveal themselves to us via poetic, naturalistic dialogue that compels us from first word to last.
As the third of the late playwright August Wilson's 10-play collection – one for each decade of the twentieth century – called The Century Cycle, Fences was inspired by the segregated streets of the Pittsburgh Hill district.
The first of Wilson's works to be adapted as a feature film, it was originally produced on Broadway in 1987 and earned Wilson a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony.
The lower-middle-class married couple under the microscope are Troy and Rose Maxson, brought to vivid life by Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, reprising the roles that they played on Broadway and that won them a couple of Tony Awards.
Troy, the prideful 53-year-old head of his household, is a garbage man who loves his wife but can be bombastic, bitter and frustrated about the racism and injustice that he feels kept him – in the pre-Jackie Robinson era -- from emerging as a star in the Negro League and having a career as an obviously talented professional baseball player, perhaps even a heralded icon.
But, as a marginalized black man in an oppressive white society, he was denied that opportunity, one that African-American players are now getting a crack at. And his resentment about that takes its toll on his loved ones, including his son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), who is being recruited as a college football player – which Troy virtually resents, justifying his own rage.
His wife of eighteen years, Rose, on the other hand, is vital and optimistic, devoting her life to building and celebrating the family and keeping them together, come what may.
But the feeling of broken dreams and choking regret has taken up residence in their home and refuses to relocate.
Wilson, who died in 2005, wrote this as his only screenplay, and the directorial reins were turned over to Washington for his third outing behind the lens, following 2002's Antwone Fisher and 2007's The Great Debaters.
Director Washington's main achievement – no surprise here -- was preserving two superior performances.
To that end, he takes a stripped-down approach and concentrates on a succession of telling closeups and meaningful exchanges, resisting the temptation to open things up, add locations, and make the piece more cinematic.
Do we need that as an add-on? Not really. So, although ultimately that might have added something to what is already there, although it might have been a way to spruce up the dialogue-driven film's less urgent and flashy middle section, the less-is-more style seems an absolutely justified artistic approach to material that defies a modern audience's short attention span with its arresting conversational energy.
Washington's antihero, Troy, is fascinatingly flawed and appropriately larger than life, in many ways a victim and in just as many the villain of the piece.
But it's Davis's Rose in support -- especially in one crucial speech late in the game that's nothing short of electrifying, surely the "specialest" effect there is – who rips our hearts out and keeps us glued to her every utterance and gesture with shattering, Oscar-caliber magnificence.
Whether Davis is speaking or not, whether she's in the shot or not, you'll find yourself looking or waiting for her: she's the heart and heartache of the movie, her every word or look part of a further layer of overwhelming authenticity.
As for Wilson's script, it is on the surface a period piece set over half a century ago. Yet it is, unfortunately, strongly resonant.
Thus does it seem, regardless of the particulars, a timeless work now available to a wider audience than the one that experienced it on a theater stage.
So call the film talky if you want, but keep in mind that it's the quality of the talk and the excellence of the talkers that makes this drama, worth 3 stars out of 4, a moving and riveting swing for the Fences.
