Fences (2016)

Fences (2016)

IMDB rating 8.0/10

Director: Denzel Washington

Writers: August Wilson (screenplay), August Wilson (based upon his play)

Stars: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson

PG-13 | 2h 18min | Drama

 Story line

An African-American father struggles with race relations in the United States while trying to raise his family in the 1950s and coming to terms with the events of his life.

 IMDB link  Here

Movie Rating ★★★★☆

 Denzel Washington and Viola Davis set to convert Tonys to Oscars

This long-awaited film adaptation of the August Wilson play remains stagy, but as a showcase for two towering performances it could hardly be improved

Ever since August Wilson’s play first premiered 33 years ago, a movie version has been mooted. Soon after it won the Pulitzer back in 1987, Eddie Murphy was lined up to play the lead – Troy, a former baseball star working as a garbage collector in 50s Pittsburgh – with Norman Jewison behind the camera. But Wilson put his foot down: there was no way it would be directed by anyone who wasn’t black.

The project fell through and the play stayed on the stage. Revival after revival met with acclaim, but Wilson held firm, continuing until his death in 2005 to insist on a black director, and to voice upset at the danger and injustice of how, in cinema at least, “whites have set themselves up as custodians of our experience”.

Wilson spoke those words in 1990. But it’s a sentiment that resonates today, as awards season rolls round again and with it the risk of another #OscarsSoWhite debacle – the backlash which met a total absence of acting nominations for anyone of colour for two years running. Fences is a film which – alongside Moonlight, Hidden Figures and (perhaps) Birth of a Nation – will help ensure that doesn’t happen this time round.

Our director is a relative novice: Denzel Washington, making his third movie behind the camera, aged 61. You can see why he picked the project: this is essentially a transfer of the 2010 Broadway revival which won he and co-star Viola Davis Tony awards, and which she – as Troy’s wife, Rose – is guaranteed to convert into Oscar gold come February. (He’ll probably have to make do with just a nomination.) Two other graduates of that production have been brought along too: Mykelti Williamson as Troy’s brain-damaged brother, Gabriel, and Russell Hornsby as Troy’s eldest son, Lyons

. The actors aren’t the only thing to have been co-opted. Although (backyard excluded) no two scenes take place in the same bit of their house – and even a couple off-property – the aesthetic is still inescapably stagy. Vestiges of greasepaint are everywhere, from the carefully assembled period props to the entrances and exits, especially those involving Gabriel, whose tragicomic histrionics, wielding a broken trumpet and warning about St Peter, fail to feel organic in a way film demands.

Washington’s movie – almost music free, completely dutiful to Wilson’s work – lies somewhere between the stabs at cinema in John Wells’s August: Osage County and the full embrace of the stage that has made live-streamed plays so popular lately. (But just remember: those have intervals. Fences does not.)

Yet immersive cinematography and widescreen escapism is not the point here. This film is conceived as a showcase for its performers, and, as that, it is immaculate. Washington has played a lot of rotters, but Troy is surely his least vain role to date. He begins irresistible, holding court for Rose and best friend Bono (Stephen Henderson) in the backyard, a few swigs of gin down – ebullient and mesmeric, deep sweetness cancelling out that hint of bitter. He’s a rascal but loyal with it; a tough father to younger son Cory (Jovan Adepo), but with justification (Troy’s monologue about his own upbringing is a tour de force of hard-earned self-pity).

The action ambles along engagingly until a mid-play revelation which, by dint of how much it must change your opinion about this man in whom you are now invested, hits the audience almost as hard as it does Rose. What was a flawless if inessential piece of works turns into something of terrible force and portent. It also gives Davis a chance to unleash something close to magical anger, underpinned by a terrible grief.

Washington’s charisma crumbles before your eyes: he is suddenly weak and pitiful, a grotesque rather than an aspiration. What’s slightly distracting is his age – at 61, the actor is nearly a decade older than Wilson intended, and the motives of the awful actions are muddied by what must be his imminent retirement. And although one admires the loyalty of bringing along most of the cast, the same ageing issue does hobble certain moments. “I’m 36!” protests Lyons at one point, unconvincingly.

None the less, Fences offers meat for moviegoers hungry for chewier fare after their turkeys (it’s released in the US on Christmas Day). Would Wilson be pleased? A black director, extraordinary performances, as faithful an adaptation as you can imagine. He’d be ecstatic.

Read Full Review at The Guardian

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Movie Rating ★★★★★

In ‘Fences,’ Denzel Washington channels a timeless character with gusto

Denzel Washington delivers a leo­nine, devouringly powerful performance as one of American theater’s most imposing patriarchs in “Fences,” a classic of contemporary dramatic literature that has finally received a respectful, often stirring, adaptation for the screen.

Washington takes on directing duties as well for a film that was adapted by playwright August Wilson before he died in 2005. As a piece of cinema, “Fences” doesn’t swing for the go-for-broke limits suggested by the title. Stagy, speech-y and limited mostly to a scruffy back yard of a working-class house in 1950s Pittsburgh, it often feels confined, even when Washington’s camera ventures out to a neighborhood bar or workplace.

But the constricted atmosphere is precisely what is called for in a rich character study of a man bursting with pent-up resentment, thwarted potential and masculine pride. As the film’s ferociously charismatic protagonist Troy Maxson, Washington roars and keeps on roaring, serving up Wilson’s angry soliloquies not so much as verbal arias as alpha-male rituals of dominance and aggression. As he prowls his own postage-stamp sized piece of turf, Troy emerges as a figure every bit as mythic, contradictory and classically combative as his name suggests.

There may not have been city sanitation workers in Euripides’s time, but Wilson imbues Troy’s profession with welcome gravitas and heroic meaning. As “Fences” opens, Troy and his best friend Bono (Stephen Henderson) are just finishing their shift, with Troy loudly complaining that the better-paid drivers’ jobs are unavailable to African Americans. When the two repair to Troy’s backyard to share a bottle of gin and repartee, Troy’s talk continues, escalating into an exuberant recollection of when he “stared down” death during a bout of pneumonia. With Washington seeming to grow steadily more tipsy in real time, the sequence announces in no uncertain terms that we’re in the hands of a master storyteller — a spinner of yarns for whom narrative has become both a prison and armor against a world in which, he says later, he was born with two strikes already against him.

Part of the audience’s fascination with Troy is how swiftly he conjures dramatically competing emotions: One moment we’re sympathizing with him for not getting his shot as a professional baseball player, and the next he’s running down star players by pooh-poohing the Negro Leagues. One moment he embodies the kind of strength and self-reliance for which the American working class is deservedly lionized, the next he’s cruelly stamping out the ambitions of his teenage son Cory (Jovan Adepo), who wants to play football for his high school team.

Overseeing Troy’s combustible mix of rage and remorse is his wife Rose, portrayed by Viola Davis in a magnificent performance rooted in stillness, but bursting with passion, life and — when the plot takes a devastating turn — superhuman fortitude and self-sacrifice. (Washington and Davis are reprising roles that earned each of them a Tony Award for the 2010 Broadway revival of “Fences.”) Other characters come and go, including Troy’s adult son by another marriage, and his brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), a brain-injured war veteran whose perfunctory appearances feel more symbolically convenient than organic. As Gabriel’s name suggests, the specter (or promise) of heavenly reckoning is a constant presence in “Fences,” which among its many virtues gives the lie to this era’s facile condemnations of identity politics. In this surpassingly American story, we see how historical and structural realities inscribe themselves into our most personal traumas and triumphs. The fates and legacies that clash and enmesh themselves throughout “Fences” are just as much products of Oedipal psychology and personal trauma as the Middle Passage and the Great Migration.

Those forces come together in the swirling vortex of Troy’s psyche in “Fences,” which takes the measure of its unruly main character, down to the last troublesome inch. Wilson’s writing and Washington’s generous performance allow the audience to revel in Troy’s spiky humor and brusquely delivered home truths, even while wincing at his capacity for self-deception and brutishness. Ringing with both ancient wisdom and searing relevance, “Fences” feels as if it’s been crafted for the ages, and for this very minute. Like all timeless personalities, Troy is a man for our era, whether he’s coming at us in full roar or by way of a far more haunting whisper.

Read full review at Washington Post

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Denzel Washington and Viola Davis reprise their stage roles in Washington's screen adaptation of the beloved 1950s-set August Wilson play about a black family in Pittsburgh.

Fences is as faithful, impeccably acted and honestly felt a film adaptation of August Wilson's celebrated play as the late author could have possibly wished for. But whether a pristine representation of all the dramatic beats and emotional surges of a stage production actually makes for a riveting film in and of itself is another matter. Having both won Tony Awards for the excellent 2010 Broadway revival of Wilson's 1986 Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis know their parts here backward and forward, and they, along with the rest of the fine cast, bat a thousand, hitting both the humorous and serious notes. But with this comes a sense that all the conflicts, jokes and meanings are being smacked right on the nose in vivid close-ups, with nothing left to suggestion, implication and interpretation.

All the same, public reaction to the material likely will be strong, resulting in a much-needed year-end commercial hit for Paramount.

One of the most individually successful installments of Wilson's celebrated “Pittsburgh Cycle,” the 1950s-set Fences alludes not just literally to the barrier middle-aged Troy (Washington) forever procrastinates about building in the small backyard of his modest city home — but to the career and life obstacles he has never managed to surmount either as a baseball player, for which he blames racial restrictions, or in his messy personal life.

It's a play of poetically heightened realism, with amusing down-home chatter, soaring monologues, boisterous drunken riffs and blunt dramatic confrontations in which Troy bitterly and sometimes cruelly draws the lines between him and those closest to him.

These include his wife Rose (Davis), who loves him, knows all his moods and yet must stoically endure his erratic behavior; teenage son Cory (Jovan Adepo), whose school football career Troy cruelly thwarts by projecting his own sports disappointments onto him; Lyons (Russell Hornsby), Troy's mild-mannered thirty-something son by a previous marriage, a jazz musician who still comes around asking for money; and younger brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), whose wartime head injuries have rendered him childlike

Getting off easy among Troy's intimates is his old pal Bono (Stephen Henderson), and much of the early going is genially dominated by the pair's increasing high humor as they end their work week as garbagemen with Troy taking out his flask and launching into tall life tales. Rose, having heard it all before, busies herself in the kitchen and alternately resists and succumbs to her husband's wily way with words.

But modest as his station in life may be, it's of paramount importance to Troy that he be regarded as the cock of his particular walk, and a great deal of what he does and says is devoted to emphasizing this point. He may make a meager living, but he uses his slim economic advantage and lordly personality to exert a certain droit du seigneur over his immediate circle; “I'm the boss around here,” he likes to remind the others. This is particularly hurtful to Cory, whose dreams his father so unreasonably thwarts, but is also demeaning to his wife and older son. Troy withholds from his loved ones almost as if by instinct, winning on points in the short term but losing in the long run due to what can only be called spiteful meanness.

In his third outing as a big-screen director (after Antwone Fisher in 2002 and The Great Debators in 2007), Washington opens up the play's action a bit, discreetly moving out onto the street for a stickball game, to a bar and into the city to get the characters out of the house once in a while.

All the same, the film cannot shed constant reminders of its theatrical roots, nor of how different theatrical playwriting is from original screenwriting in this day and age. There were periods, especially through the 1950s and 1960s, when nearly every Broadway and London play of any artistic importance or commercial viability was adapted into a film, when audiences were accustomed to lengthy exchanges and monologues during which characters would basically speechify while being photographed. Now such transfers are a rarity — the last straight play to win a best picture Academy Award was Driving Miss Daisy 27 years ago, and perhaps the three most notable non-musical plays made into films in the past few years, August: Osage County, Carnage and Venus in Fur, went nowhere commercially.

Due to Fences' star power and innate qualities, this will not be the case for the film, which offers enough dramatic meat, boisterous humor and lived-in performances to hook audiences of all stripes. But just one example of a device that proved acceptable onstage but plays awkwardly onscreen is that of Troy's brain-damaged brother, who wanders through multiple scenes with a bugle strung around his neck in the manner of any number of kindly “simpleton” characters that used to pop up in plays and literature. Of far more symbolic than dramatic use to the story, Gabriel's movements and utterances come off as awkward and pretentiously meaningful onscreen in a way that they did not onstage.

As carefully as Washington moves the action around the limited locations, the abundance of long speeches, high-pitched exchanges and emotional depth charges are unmistakably redolent of the stage rather than very closely related to the way films have been written in a very long time. It was perhaps the problem with the film Steve Jobs last year that it was written more like a play than a film, and the sense of excess speechifying and calculated waves of character revelation give the piece an increasingly laborious feel one expects and wants in the theater but that seems somehow alien onscreen.

Fences deals overtly with racial issues almost exclusively in connection with Troy's resentment over employment opportunities. Insisting that being black is what prevented him from becoming a big league baseball player, he then badmouths the black stars who made the grade in the majors. Of more relevance to his current life is his eventual success in breaking down an absurd racial barrier that has long prevented black trash collectors from moving up to become garbage truck drivers, which pays better. Small victory though it is (and it's related just anecdotally, not dramatized onscreen), this breakthrough would seem to represent Troy's most purely admirable accomplishment, especially in light of the big bombshell he drops later on.

Great in these roles onstage, Washington and Davis repeat the honors here, he with quicksilver shifts from ingratiating tall-tale-telling and humor to bulldog-like demands to his wife and offspring that he be treated like the boss king he fancies himself to be. Davis beautifully illuminates the ways in which Rose has learned to live with this man, to be quiet or cut him slack when it's not worth the effort of a fight, but to make it clear that she has lines she will not allow to be crossed. Despite his delusions and pride, she clearly still loves the guy, and the two make an entirely convincing long-term husband and wife.

Henderson is a joy as Troy's easygoing straight man, who indulges his old pal's every whim, joke and complaint, while Adepo well channels the tension and rebellious desires the athletic, straight-arrow son must suck up when his father lays down the law.

Production designer David Gropman and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen create a warmly appealing lived-in ambiance. Playwright Tony Kushner receives a prominent co-producer credit, reportedly for having done the pruning and shaping to bring the three-hour play down to a more screen-friendly length.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

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Denzel Washington and Viola Davis triumphant in August Wilson drama

Robust, delicate, sublimely acted and a close cinematic cousin to the theatrical original, director Denzel Washington's film version of "Fences" makes up for a lot of overeager or undercooked stage-to-screen adaptations over the decades.

The performances of Washington, Viola Davis and their colleagues offer something more than mere skill or easy familiarity with August Wilson's 1987 drama. (Washington and Davis won Tony Awards for their work in the 2010 Broadway revival.) Even as Wilson's 1957-set story, full of sidewinding grace notes and rhetorical flourishes, grows darker, sadder, more painful, the acting exhilarates. The people in charge, on screen and off, know what they have here, and they don't get material like this very often in their careers.

Wilson, who won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for "Fences," was a poet turned playwright, with one foot in realism and the other in what lies beyond. The story of the Maxson family owes little to the plot-driven likes of Arthur Miller; it's dominated by long passages of unusually rich, rolling dialogue and monologue.

"Fences" deals with the contradictions and conflicts within Troy Maxson, an ex-convict whose life has, in Wilson's phrase, "rubbed him raw." The onetime Negro League baseball hopeful now hauls garbage for the city of Pittsburgh, and the play (and the film) stays close to his house and backyard, though there are a few shrewdly opened-up scenes taking place on the truck, in a tavern and the like.

This husband and father finds himself at a tipping point. Troy risks his wife's trust and his domestic stability, while stubbornly preventing his high school-age son (Jovan Adepo, excellent), also an athlete, from having his heart broken by a sport he loves.

Davis is spectacularly good as Rose, Troy's wife, who takes an increasingly prominent role in the drama. Other sterling members of the 2010 revival ensemble reprise their roles for Washington's third directorial feature. Stephen Henderson is Troy's longtime friend and co-worker Bono, in thrall to Troy's yarn-spinning but concerned about his fidelity; Russell Hornsby stops by a couple of juicy scenes as Lyons, Troy's wastrel son from a previous marriage. Mykelti Williamson is Troy's brother, Gabriel, badly injured in World War II (the settlement money paid for the Maxson's house, a fact Troy cannot resolve without a headful of guilt).

The glory of "Fences" cannot be separated from what makes it difficult to pull off. Troy's a marvelously thorny protagonist, and there are moments in his downward spiral when Washington is reaching down into some very tough and personal places. (The line "I can't taste nuthin'" is a brilliant moment.) When Rose must respond to the one thing she feared in her life with Troy, Davis lets him have it with everything she has as a truthful, fearless actress.

Most times, a film adaptation of a traditionally structured play takes dutiful, sideways steps to fix certain things, bringing offstage characters (the woman named Alberta, in this case) on screen. Not here, at least not much. Washington's only real misstep as director, I think, comes in the eternally problematic epilogue, where we get a boatload of forgiveness for Troy that's largely but not fully earned, capped by a heavenly reaction shot (literally, of the heavens) that feels pushy. If the camera had stayed on the faces of the characters, no problem. Small matters. With astute and uncredited cutting and tweaking by producer Tony Kushner, "Fences" works as a showcase for its towering lead performances and, just as crucially, as proof that the joyous cadence of Wilson's best writing works in more than one medium.

Read Full review at Chicago Tribune

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 Reverent Fences Works So Hard…It Stops Working   

A brilliant cast, including Denzel Washington, Viola Davis and Mykelti Williamson, can't overcome heavy-handed direction

Even if you didn’t see August Wilson’s Fences onstage, you can get a sense of its bones by watching Denzel Washington’s film adaptation: They shine through like a radioactive skeleton. But that’s not enough to make Fences an effective piece of filmmaking—a shame, because every actor in the cast, including Viola Davis, Mykelti Williamson and Washington himself, does terrific work here. By themselves, they make the movie worth seeing, though in the end, it feels too much like a school assignment. Washington approaches the material with canonical reverence, but that isn’t the same as shaking it up and bringing it to life on-screen.

Washington stars as Troy, a Baltimore sanitation worker in 1950s Pittsburgh who works hard to make a decent home for his wife, Rose (the always vibrant Davis), and teenage son, Cory (Jovan Adepo). Troy is an exuberant presence, always putting on a show when there are outsiders around, like his pal and co-worker, Bono (a marvelous Stephen Henderson). But Rose and Cory see another side of him, and they see right through him: Though his wife is loyal, and truly loves him, he tests her limits by dropping a marriage-shattering bombshell. Meanwhile, Cory’s conflicts with his father have been simmering for ages, despite Rose’s attempts to keep peace in the household. Cory is a gifted football player, poised for a college scholarship, but Troy—a failed athlete—demands that he prioritize his after-school job over practice, effectively choking off the kid’s dreams.

It’s almost impossible to take sides in Fences. The material is constructed so you feel sympathy for everyone, including—and perhaps especially—Troy. He’s angry, frustrated and guilt-ridden, for reasons that are blazingly easy to understand. He has a brother, Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), whose war injuries have caused him to regress to a childlike state—Troy has benefited financially from Gabriel’s condition, and that anguishes him. His own youthful dreams of being a star athlete were shattered. Plus, he’s a black man in 1950s America, a state of being that needs no more explanation.

Washington is a sensitive actor who dives deep to capture Troy’s bruised, angry essence. And as a director, he captures the rhythm and texture of everyday lives beautifully—of cakes made for church bake sales, of chairs set out in the yard so people can sit for a spell with visitors or just unwind alone and think, of piles of leaves that need to be raked, of roofs waiting to be replaced. But more often, the film spells everything out in bold letters. That approach can work onstage but, on film, it reads as a kind of illustrated Braille, a language heavy with diagrammatic symbols just in case you’re not feeling enough. When Troy teases Rose flirtatiously, Washington cuts to show her laughing, just so we know she finds the joke funny. In theater, there’s no such thing as a reaction shot. When the director and the actors are doing their job, you know where to look. Fences would be a better movie if Washington trusted us more. He’s doing too much of our job for us, and he doesn’t have to work that hard.

Read full Review atTime

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  Beneath the Bombast, ‘Fences’ Has an Aching Poetry

By the end of “Fences,” we will have learned a lot about Troy Maxson — about his hard Southern childhood, his time in prison and the Negro Leagues, his work ethic, his sexual appetites and his parenting philosophy — but the first and most important thing we know about the man is that he is one of the world’s great talkers. He enters the screen on a tide of verbiage, jawing with his friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and bantering with his wife, Rose (Viola Davis). The audience quickly grasps what Rose and Bono have known for years. Troy is by turns funny, provocative, inspiring and hurtful, but one thing he will never be as long as he draws breath is silent.

There is plenty of brag and bluster in his speech, as well as flecks of profanity and poetry. He tells tales and busts chops with unflagging energy, at times testing the patience of Rose, Bono and his other friends and relations. But mostly Troy, who makes no secret of his illiteracy, uses language as a tool of analysis, a way of explaining what’s on his mind and figuring out the shape of the world he must inhabit.

Language is also, in another sense, Troy’s very substance. He came into being as words on the page, words assembled and given life by the playwright August Wilson. Embodied onstage first by James Earl Jones in the original 1985 production of “Fences” and more recently by Denzel Washington in the 2010 Broadway revival, Troy is one of the indelible characters in American dramatic literature, equal to — and in some ways a pointed response to — Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.

Mr. Washington, reprising the role in this fine film adaptation, which he also directed, is a pretty good talker in his own right. His voice is a mighty instrument, and if you closed your eyes and just listened to “Fences” you would hear a verbal performance of unmatched force and nuance. More than one, in fact. Ms. Davis, who also starred in that 2010 revival, has fewer lines, but as the story of their marriage unfolds, the center of gravity shifts quietly and inexorably in her direction. Rose’s plain-spokenness is the necessary counterweight to her husband’s grandiloquence.

But even as it properly foregrounds Wilson’s dialogue — few playwrights have approached his genius for turning workaday vernacular into poetry — “Fences” is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play. The action ventures beyond Troy and Rose’s yard — into their house and onto the street, mostly — to give them a bit more room to move and the audience a little more to look at. Confinement, however, is a theme implied in the play’s title, and opening it up too much would risk diluting the power of watching large personalities colliding in a narrow place.

If the sound were to suddenly fail — or if the dialogue were dubbed into Martian — the impact of the performances would still be palpable. The stories Troy and Rose tell about their lives up until this point are inscribed in their bodies. There is tenderness in the way they approach each other, and an undertow of fatigue as well. In middle age, with a teenage son named Cory (Jovan Adepo), they have settled into habits that are evident in their posture and their gestures. Troy, 53 years old and employed as a sanitation worker, has the coiled strength and physical assurance of the athlete he used to be. He has probably lost some speed on the basepaths, but when he says he could knock a fastball out of the park you believe him.

It’s 1957, though, and time has betrayed him. When in 1947 Jackie Robinson broke the major-league color line, it was too late for Troy, and his bitterness infects his relationship with Cory, who is being scouted for college football scholarships. Troy’s other son, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), is a musician, and the dynamic among the three of them is one of the ways “Fences” echoes “Death of a Salesman.” Troy’s betrayal of Rose is another.

To say that the difference between Willy and Troy is racial is to state the obvious and also to risk understating Wilson’s achievement. “Fences” is part of a cycle of 10 plays about the African-American experience that amounts to a critique of the American dream from the standpoint of people intent on defying their exclusion from it. If Willy Loman’s tragedy proceeds from disillusionment, Troy’s redemption is possible because he never had any illusions to begin with. His rigid ideas about work, responsibility and manhood constitute not a demand for attention, but an assertion of dignity. His cruelty, selfishness and shortsightedness are somehow inseparable from his loyalty, his steadfastness and his existential courage.

Rose knows all of this, and helps the audience to see it. As incarnated by Ms. Davis, she is more than a foil and a helpmate. Her relative reticence makes her not just the film’s conscience, but also its central mystery. It falls to Rose to solve the problems her husband has created, to smooth over his relationships with his sons and his brother, Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), a brain-damaged veteran of World War II. She also struggles with a challenge analogous to the one Troy faces, one made more complicated by his role in maintaining it.

“What about my life?” she asks him in the midst of an especially wrenching confrontation. What is most remarkable about this film is how thoroughly — how painfully, how honestly, how beautifully — it answers that question.

  

Read Full review at New York times 

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Movie Rating ★★★✬

Wilson's words sing in Washington's 'Fences'

The blue music of "Fences" sings with a ferocious beauty in Denzel Washington's long-in-coming adaptation of August Wilson's masterpiece of African-American survival and sorrow.

Transfers from stage to screen often serve up only a pale reflection of the electric, live-wire theater experience. But Washington, in his good sense, has neither strained to make August's Pulitzer Prize-winning play particularly cinematic nor to "open it up" much from the confines of the staged settings.

What we have, instead, is a meat-and-potatoes drama, delivered with full-bodied, powerhouse performances and an attuned ear to the bebop rhythms of Wilson's dense, musical dialogue. The 1957-set "Fences" surely doesn't call for anything like a Stanley Kubrick treatment. Just give us the words and the people, with passion.

"Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner," says Troy Maxson (Washington), a 53-year-old garbage man in Pittsburgh's Hill District. Primarily from the hemmed-in backyard of his brick house he pours forth a torrent of rage, bitterness, pride and anguish.

"Fences," part of August's celebrated 10-part, decade-by-decade Century cycle, ought to have been made decades ago. It nearly was once, but Wilson's insistence that a black director make it was deemed impractical by a backward Hollywood.

So Washington's "Fences," the first big-screen adaption of any of Wilson's plays, is righting a wrong. The upside to the timing is that it would be difficult imagining better performers than Washington and Viola Davis, who starred together in a 2010 Broadway revival.

Wilson claimed to have never seen or read Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" before writing "Fences," but the two works are undeniably linked in their grand, wrenching portraits of bone-tired mid-century American men coming to the realization of how little their lifetime of work has gotten them.

Maxson, an illiterate former Negro League baseball star who spent 15 years in prison, is a nine-to-five, blue-collar patriarch in loud revolt against a life that's ground him down. With almost unrelenting bombast, he's at war with the racism that's boxed him in his whole life, with the changing world around him and with his own mortality. Feeling the devil near, Maxson is building a fence to keep him out -- though there are other reasons he's closing himself off. "I ain't goin' easy," he swears while clutching a bottle to an imagined but palpably present devil. No one would doubt his resolve.

The other characters operate in reaction to the verbal force that is Maxson. First and foremost is his wife, the demure but formidable Rose (Viola Davis), who gradually moves from the kitchen toward the center of the film. She's a figure of devotion whose own pains and regrets don't spill out until her climactic speech: "I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom," she tells Maxson. It's a knockout moment, delivered by a blistering Davis with tears and snot smeared across her face.

The heart of the drama, though, is its father-son story. Jovan Adepo plays Cory, whose college hopes rest on his football skills. Maxson lectures him again and again: "The white man ain't gonna let you get nowhere with that football noway," he tells him.

Washington's performance is titanic, surely one of the best of his career. Maxson's deluge of dialogue — all its tale tales, braggadocio and pain — just flows out of him.

Washington keeps almost entirely to the play's settings, but the most notable exception is its first scene where Maxson and his friend Jim Bono (a soulful Stephen McKinley Henderson) ride on the back of a garbage truck, up and down Pittsburgh's hills, while Maxson rails against the lack of black drivers.

It's an indelible image, and perhaps "Fences" could have used a few more such flourishes. The other obvious visual attempt — a handful of wordless montages — is a misstep, out of sync with the rest of the film. "Fences" may never lose the look and sound of a play, but Washington's close-up focus on the characters only heightens the dignity Wilson bestowed on them.

Read full review at Daily Mail

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