Pittsburgh (Scene) Stealers

Denzel Washington’s film adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences will no doubt spark a fresh round of opinion-slinging about the need to “open up” a stage show for the movie medium. No matter how well-intentioned, these sorts of reductive debates only serve to seal simple-minded concepts of what a film can be into tiny, airless boxes, when the true magic of cinema is that it can be anything (or nothing) at all.

For what it’s worth, the film adaptation of Fences largely fails the “opening up” test—it’s not self-consciously stagy in the vein of Dogville or Double Suicide, but it mostly sticks to a single location, and indulges the actors in leisurely paced scenes loaded with Wilson’s loquaciously common language. But that so-called staginess is also bracingly cinematic in its way, and the film works (and occasionally doesn’t work) for presumably the same reasons that the material worked (and occasionally didn’t work) on stage.

Fences is the sixth play in Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a run of 10 plays mostly set in the same African-American neighborhood, with each production taking place in a different decade of the 20th century. Fences takes place in the 1950s, and Washington plays Troy Maxson, a garbage collector and former Negro Leagues ballplayer still bitter over the shot he never got. Troy doesn’t share the optimism of his comparatively sensitive sons, certain that the rigged system will fail his boys as it failed him, and maybe even secretly hoping that it will.

He unleashes his resentment, often in the form of braggadocio and tall tales, on the people around him—his saintly wife Rose (Viola Davis), his best friend Bono (Stephen Henderson), his brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson) and his sons Lyons (Russell Hornsby) and Cory (Jovan Adepo). The action occurs over a series of weekends across several years, with Troy holding court on Friday night as a bottle gets passed around the porch, while on Saturdays he slowly constructs a backyard fence whose symbolic value gets explained to death.

Fences is the third feature directed by Washington, and it feels like those two earlier, minor efforts were mere warmups for eventually tackling something as prestigious as August Wilson. Washington hardly rewrites the book, but the filmmaking is fluid and patient and tasteful-in-a-good-way, and the images captured by cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen (Far from the Madding Crowd) convey a modern American mythology without resorting to sepia-toned shtick.

The acting here is uniformly good … and such generous portions! None of the scenery-chewers go home hungry. Washington and Davis starred together in the Tony-winning 2010 revival of the play, so their chemistry is easy and unquestionable. Denzel reaches for the rafters for his performance, but it’s still a treat to watch him in tour-de-force mode. Davis is practically incapable of sounding a false note—she only seems to get more real and honest the closer the script forces her toward cliché. Her passion, grace and subtle physicality perfectly complements and grounds Washington’s bigness and broadness.