My Petty Review of Fences and Viola Davis' Snot

The play’s the thing, as the Bard once said, but rarely do we see great theatre translate well to the silver screen. A scant few manage to stick the landing . . . but for every Streetcar Named Desire and Glengarry Glen Ross, you have a Rock of Ages or an August: Osage County. It takes a lot of skill and fortitude to keep the “stage” out of a story that had its origins there.

The latest transfer from Broadway to Hollywood is Fences, August Wilson’s adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play. It is notable not just for bringing an acclaimed play to the screen, but for giving two acclaimed actors the opportunity to reprise their legendary stage performances on celluloid. What’s more, one of those actors is directing the project himself.

Having lived and breathed the play for almost a decade and winning a Tony Award in the process, it’s fair to say Fences is Denzel Washington’s passion project. And there’s certainly much to be passionate about, particularly as an actor: the story follows Troy Maxson, a former Negro League baseball ace who never cracked the color barrier and wound up eyeing out a meager living as a garbage collector in 1950s Pittsburgh, all while having to keep his family unit running like clockwork. Washington’s interpretation of Maxson is that of a larger-than-life sermonizer, the sort that in another life and time might’ve found success as a backwoods revival-tent preacher. Troy is all shit-eating grins and quick-fire homilies, wont to slather on the B.S. with his co-worker, drinking buddy and confidante Bono (a wonderfully stalwart Stephen McKinley Henderson). The only thing keeping Troy (so says he, at any rate) on the straight and narrow is his dutiful wife of sixteen years. Rose (Viola Davis, reprising her Tony-winning part alongside Washington) is at first the familiar supportive spouse in any ‘50s family, archetype bordering on stereotype. But as the film progresses and the cracks in the Maxson family unit start to grow, so too does Rose’s resolve.

For behind closed doors (and not-so-closed-off backyards), Troy isn’t the backslapper he purports to be. He is a stern and unforgiving pater familias verging on tyrannical, quick to lay down the law at every opportunity and always looking at every gesture with hooded suspicion. His older son from a previous marriage (Russell Hornsby) is a musician, but Troy looks at him as a good-for-nothing layabout always looking to make an easy buck—especially from his old man come payday. His younger boy, Cory (Jovan Adepo), is a budding high school athlete eager to break from the shackles of his home life and make something of himself as a college football player, but Troy forbids him from those pursuits, ostensibly under the reasoning that as a black man, he would be taken advantage of and get screwed out of an honest living. But there is a seething undercurrent of jealousy tinged in these warnings, as though Troy fears Cory’s success would be emasculating to him, the father, the dominator. Rose, while not afraid to speak her mind, nevertheless is constrained by society’s expectations of the ‘50s housewife and thus has very little authority under Troy’s roof. The only member of the Maxson clan Troy shows any softness toward is his younger brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), who suffered a debilitating brain injury fighting in World War II—but there is also more to that story than simply filial duty.

Washington has long lived with Troy Maxson in his veins, nursing the character over the years since he played him onstage. One would expect an actor to mine some sympathy for a character they’ve been close to for so long, to make excuses for him. And as Washington pulled double-duty as director, you’d think that would be magnified. Not so. Washington knows full well that Troy is a hypocrite and while he clearly enjoys spitting the choice lines August Wilson gave to him, he also seems to relish in exposing the bitter rind of Maxson’s soul. When confronted by Cory over his lack of support and love for him, Troy’s famous riposte (“What law says I got to like you?”) has a deliciously staccato beat to it that viewers will find amusing, as my audience did . . . but it is more an indictment of Troy than it is of his son. And the more that Cory labors under the strain of that dynamic, we end up rooting for him to stand up to the old man.

But while Cory is naturally rebelling under his father’s influence, Rose can only wither. And when a past sin of Troy’s comes to the light, Davis—who spends much of the film somberly looking at the action from the corner of one frame or another, only to break in with a soft interjection here and there—cuts loose, lobbing sixteen years of hardscrabble existence right back in her husband’s haughty face. I’ve complained of Davis’s staginess in the past, how her emoting seldom feels natural. And while this big scene does fit the pattern of her big emotional moments in the past (I really hope she has stock in Kleenex), it feels surprisingly and refreshingly restrained, tweaked back from its usual maximum. Most of her truly cutting lines aren’t even delivered in big, screamy soliloquy, but instead in slow, even tones. We are watching the light going out for a woman’s life, not with a bang, but a long, slow whimper. It’s too subtle for the stage, perhaps, but just right for the screen.

As a director, Washington’s track record has been somewhat spotty for me. He’s competent, but rarely comes off inspired. Here, he largely manages to keep out of his own way and just let the actors (himself included) do their thing. There’s very little flash to it, which is both a good and bad thing. It’s good in that for the most part, there isn’t any sort of false “auteuristic” style that can pull us out of the film. It’s bad in that when he does decide to make a flourish or two, it stands out all the more. There’s one bizarre time-elapse shot that moves one character the space of six feet, and the first half’s editing felt a bit too chop-heavy in the cross-cutting department. Washington may not have the moody command of William Friedkin in his Letts adaptations, or the flexible wisdom of James Foley when he did Glengarry Glen Ross, but what he lacks in style, he makes up for in respect. One can feel his deep reverence for the material, and while his devotion is almost to a fault (the script could’ve done with a fair bit of tightening here and there, and honestly—aside from the guilt Troy may or may not have surrounding him—you could almost excise Brother Gabriel from the plot entirely and it wouldn’t lose much), it makes up for a lot in my book.

And indeed, that love fuels Fences the whole way through. Even if Washington’s visual aesthetic may not be his strong suit, Charlotte Bruus Christensen does a fine job of making it feel as fluid as possible, taking the edge of the general stodginess a translated play typically codifies. Marcelo Zarvos’s score is lithe and light, poignant when it needs to be without seeming mawkish. But as with most adapted plays, it’s about the performances, and boy, do they shine through.