Fences (Movie Review by Bob Racine

2 hrs & 18 min, color, 2016

What was the status of civil rights for minorities in the early 1950s in the U.S., long before the landmark legislation that was enacted over a decade later?   You get a sense of it in this adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning play by that prolific African American playwright August Wilson.  It was first staged in 1987.  It is set in a poverty row neighborhood in Pittsburgh and it spares no effort to disclose the fragility and festering though hidden wounds that keep a small struggling family just a baby step away from heartbreak and the collapse of love and personal loyalty.

Not that Wilson was out to make an encompassing socio-political statement – in this or any other of his ten plays, all with black characters and their settings in Pittsburgh.  He does not scan the length and breadth of anything; he just observes the human minutiae, the blades of grass, not the sprawling forest.  The two leading characters are Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) and his wife Rose (Viola Davis), two economically poor people in their fifties.  Both of them have had to confront, and are still confronting, disappointment.  Troy was a runaway from home at fourteen and a small time thief who spent fifteen years in prison before landing a job as a city garbage collector with no real future.  He fears that his two sons, Lyons (Russell Homesby), already an adult, and Cory (Jovan Adepo), seventeen, may follow in the path he has trod, and his fear impels him to treat them with overweening strictness – a strictness that leads eventually to mental and emotional abuse.  A quite charming fellow, until his sense of control is challenged!

Troy from early on has always dreamed of being a professional baseball player but was prevented from realizing that dream by the many years he spent behind bars.  By the time he got out he was already far into his thirties and no pro ball club was hiring black men to any great extent, especially one of his age and lack of training.  Jackie Robinson’s career was just getting off the ground.  He had to learn that trying for a career in sports was futile for him, and he demands that his sons develop a craft rather than go in that direction.  His clash with Cory, who has been presented with a chance to make a start in football, needing only his parents’ consent, is heartbreaking.  Troy refuses the consent, when Cory evades getting and keeping a job at an A&P. 

Rose is a more than decent woman, one who loves her sons and tries to protect them from the hardnose policies of their father.  Viola Davis brings her to vibrant life, a woman of deep and provocative feeling who, as she tells Troy in an especially stressful moment, has shared the same dumpy house with him in the same dumpy neighborhood for all the eighteen years they have been married.  “I had dreams too [that were never realized]!”  You know from hearing and studying her that her love for her husband is real, which makes his disclosure of infidelity exceedingly painful.

Troy has his moments of great insight and he knows how to make and keep a friendship with a fellow garbage collector named Jim Bono (Stephen Henderson).  The movie begins on the street on a Friday afternoon, when he and Bono are wrapping up their day’s work and when they settle into Troy’s backyard for lightweight conversation and good-humored exchange.  Bono is a short stocky man, very low keyed and good natured.  He makes appearances throughout the movie and becomes a kind of moral compass for Troy. 

The other key character is Gabriel, Troy’s brother (Myketi Williamson), a World War II veteran with a head injury from combat that today might be controllable but at that time condemned him to a state of arrested childlike development. He visits Troy and Rose intermittently, carrying a bugle wrapped over his shoulder, thinking that he is the Gabriel of Scripture that is supposed to blow his horn at the end of human history.  He walks around through the streets with a grinning face proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  Troy seems to have infinite love and tolerance for him and points to him as a casualty of the white race’s wars.  Gabe (as he is called for short) plays a very vital role during the closing moments of the story.

A good discussion question: How does Rose heal the rupturing that her husband has created, or does she, and what motivates her to make the sacrifice she chooses to make that closes off so many doors and opens so  many more?

Washington and Davis starred together on Broadway in a revival of “Fences” in 2010.  In this adaptation to the screen Denzel himself is the director of the show.  He joins a very minute club of motion picture persona who have dared to attempt the task of directing themselves.  Few have ever met with sterling success at this feat.  Orson Welles and Woody Allen still occupy a commanding lead.  Washington seems to have become the latest of them, though it is very difficult making pure cinema out of a highly theatrical piece of work.  As with the play, most all of the action takes place in the yard or the interior of the Maxson home. 

One factor that glares at us is the complete absence of drugs.  Today in a redominantly poor black neighborhood that would be highly unlikely.  Booze does play a part.  In fact, that turns out to be an Achilles Heel for this black man.  He can make with the words in great abundance, and his jolly demeanor makes him immediately charming, but he drinks too much.  One moment of drunken debauchery turns him into an emotionally lethal weapon in dealing with Cory, who has signed up for military service.  It is a signal moment of chosen and complete alienation. 

One noticeable failing of the film is the complete anonymity of Troy’s mistress.  Even if she is never seen or heard from in the play, there is no established protocol against bringing her to life in the screen adaptation.  For someone who becomes a wedge between husband and wife, greater attention should have been paid.  I suspect that Washington’s respect for August Wilson, one that borders on worship, may have elicited from him a fear of altering the supposed sanctity of the original text.

But the performances of all the cast are top grade and they boost the power and the poetry of the classic August work to give us a memorable experience.  I would walk many miles to see either of the two leads, Denzel or Viola, at work in anything. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.