In his film adaptation of August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson, director Malcom Washington approaches his source material with both reverence and flexibility, providing space for the film’s accomplished cast to deliver the late playwright’s language with conviction, while broadening the spatial and temporal scope beyond the play’s single setting. Not every attempt to create cinema from Wilson’s stirring play is effective, but Washington’s generous direction of his actors and the uniform care displayed toward Wilson’s words ensure the film’s artistic value.
Set in the summer of 1936, The Piano Lesson is propelled by a seemingly simple conflict between siblings. Boy Willie (John David Washington, Malcolm’s brother and son of producer Denzel Washington) visits his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) in Pittsburgh unannounced. He is dead-set on selling the family piano in Berniece’s possession, hand-carved with pictures of their family members by their enslaved grandfather, which Berniece repeatedly refuses. Generations of familial trauma are wrapped up in the piano, and the siblings are at odds on how to address it: Boy Willie wants to use the profits from the piano’s sale to buy the land their father and enslaved ancestors worked, while Berniece does not want the heirloom to be sold off.
A haunting intrudes on their familial dispute. Sutter, who owned the land Boy Willie and Berniece’s family worked on — and may have had a hand in murdering their father after he reclaimed the piano from Sutter’s possession — has died after falling into a well, and his spirit has appeared, soaking wet, to Berniece. As her and Boy Willie’s argument intensifies, Sutter’s ghost continues to manifest, staking his own claim on the instrument and eventually forcing a reckoning.
Washington and Deadwyler deliver impassioned performances and evince sharp understanding of their characters. Washington plays the determined Boy Willie with unflagging energy, his boisterous and sustained intensity suggesting the need to barrel forward in life to avoid dwelling on past pain. Berniece, who lives in her uncle Doaker’s (Samuel L. Jackson) house with her 11-year-old daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), focuses on day-to-day survival rather than harboring dreams for the future, and Deadwyler imbues her with steely reserve — which Boy Willie, relentless as he is, struggles to break. When Boy Willie’s repetitive insistence on selling the piano finally does effect an emotional response in Berniece, she responds by pouring forth a litany of grief and grievance. She reminds Boy Willie of their mourning mother’s attachment to the piano after their father’s death, attacks the men present for what she sees as their tendency toward violence and theft, and accuses Boy Willie of complicity in her husband’s death three years prior. In her performance of this monologue, Deadwyler is utterly incandescent, pinioning Washington with her gaze and wrapping her sonorous voice around Wilson’s language with a dynamic range that reveals startling depths of emotion. Like the previous adaptations of plays from August Wilson’s Century Cycle, Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson is in part a vehicle for actors to command the screen, and Deadwyler proves herself to be the standout among a strong cast.
Washington is a sensitive director of this seasoned ensemble, also including Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, and Corey Hawkins, and he consistently finds grace notes in subtle reactions from each actor, even when they are not the primary focus of the scene. If guiding his cast is Washington’s greatest strength as a director, his handling of the plot’s supernatural component is a comparably weak point. Washington invokes horror tropes whenever Sutter’s ghost appears: there are jump scares, flickering lights, crashing dishes, portentous, atonal music (scored by Alexandre Desplat). These gestures at genre may be an attempt to draw in casual viewers more interested in paranormal activity than Pulitzer-winning drama, but Washington struggles to integrate them convincingly. Rather than inducing fear, Washington undercuts the symbolic potency of Sutter’s ghost by relying too heavily on clichéd presentational techniques.
The director’s efforts to “open up” the film from its source material, though, are generally more effective. The Piano Lesson‘s opening scene stages a key event years prior to the events of the play with tension and mystery, and brief cutaway flashbacks are threaded throughout the film; and while they can be occasionally overbearing, they do allow for sites of visual interest during moments of expository dialogue. Director of photography Michael Gioulakis creates distinct aesthetics for these flashbacks, setting them apart from the core narrative’s more naturalistic look through highly stylized color and lighting. Washington and Virgil Williams, who collaboratively adapted the screenplay, also add scenes where characters venture out of Doaker’s house, the most successful of which finds Boy Willie and his friend Lymon (Fisher) visiting a saloon, where spirited dancers and a musical cameo from Erykah Badu provide a vibrant counterpoint to the film’s otherwise cloistered, near-Gothic environs.
If Washington’s directorial flourishes that deviate from Wilson’s play are a mixed success, The Piano Lesson is still a thoughtful, committed adaptation of a powerful play, and importantly one that is crafted with the requisite emotional and historical depth. Through a domestic conflict centered on an heirloom piano, Wilson crafted a narrative that explores descendants of enslaved people wrestling with the generations of oppression that lay on their shoulders. Its characters struggle between honoring the pain inflicted on their ancestors and pushing forward with their lives in a still-unjust society; the appearance of ghosts is a logical manifestation of the generational hauntings they are forced to bear. Washington’s treatment of the film’s climactic scene, wherein Berniece finally sits at the piano and calls upon her deceased family members to rid her home of Sutter’s menacing presence, encapsulates the stark power the film achieves in its finest moments: Deadwyler’s quiet, tremulous pleas steadily crescendo, her commitment to protecting her living family embedded in her voice’s gathering strength. It’s a moment that haunts, invoking a historical lineage of survival and resistance that transcends the cinematic frame.
DIRECTOR: Malcolm Washington; CAST: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: November 8; STREAMING: November 22; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 5 min.
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