Eight years after Denzel Washington brought August Wilson's play Fences to cinematic life, another Washington is trying his hand at one of the playwright's works with Denzel's youngest son, Malcolm Washington, adapting another of Wilson's Century Cycle plays, The Piano Lesson.
A family affair in front of and behind the camera — Denzel and his daughter Katia serve as producer and executive producer, respectively, while Malcolm's brother John David costars — Washington's feature debut is a visually striking film that crackles with lyrical tension.
Set in Pittsburgh in 1936 following the Great Depression, the central conflict within the film revolves around a piano, with hand-carved faces of slaves engraved on it, stolen from a slave owner named James Sutter (Jay Peterson) years earlier. Housed within the home of his older sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson), Boy Willie (John David Washington) views the musical instrument as his ticket to financial security. Arriving at his sister's door unannounced with his pal Lymon (Ray Fisher), Boy Willie has travelled all the way from Mississippi with the intention of selling the family heirloom.
Hoping to buy the land his family was once enslaved on, Boy Willie believes that the piano will garner the money he needs to seal the deal. However, Berniece is reluctant to part with the instrument because of its deep connections to their family's ancestry. The piano's ties to the past may also be supernatural in nature, as Berniece is convinced that Sutter, having died under mysterious circumstances, might be haunting the house as a spirit.
As the siblings engage in a battle of wills, The Piano Lesson evolves into an intriguing examination of desire and legacy.
By containing most of the verbal sparring to the confines of the house, Washington's film captures the family dynamics and how the burdens of the past impact both their joys and pains. A great example of this is found when Boy Willie, Lymon, Doaker and Wining Boy (Michael Potts) break out the alcohol and engage in a drunken song about work. It's moments like this where The Piano Lesson, much like Denzel Washington's Fences and George C. Wolfe's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom before it, truly feels cinematic rather than a play brought to life on the big screen.
Giving a sense of grandeur to its intimate story about ancestry, Washington effectively captures the sense of longing for bigger things that Boy Wille and Berniece each crave. While Boy Willie is desperate to gain independence through land acquisition, it requires sacrificing the touchstones of the past for the lure of money. Unlike her brother, Berniece refuses to let her quest for upward mobility blind her to the significant hardships their ancestors endured to get her to that point.
While Boy Willie's exploits are the gasoline that ignites the plot's fire, it's Berniece who makes the flames burn the brightest.
Conveying Berniece as a complex mixture of sadness, ghostly fear, inner strength and a desire for intimacy (but reluctance to settle for the local preacher, played by Corey Hawkins, who has been trying to woo her since her husband passed), Deadwyler brings rich layers to the role. Delivering one of the year's best performances, the actress single-handedly steals the film from her similarly talented male costars.
It's through Berniece that Washington's film is most effective in elevating the Southern gothic elements that permeate the film. While not all the ghostly beats evoke chills, the juxtaposing of Berniece's supernatural beliefs with Boy Willie's dismissals of apparitions adds an intriguing aspect to the film's themes about honouring the past
A strong debut from Malcolm Washington, The Piano Lesson finds hope and healing down the path the ancestors paved.