There is a particular refinement of pleasure in watching actors as great as Davis and Washington working together: they duet with hyper-articulate eloquence, and it’s almost like a non-musical opera or secular revivalist meeting. There is similar power in the timeshift between Lyons’s promise as a young jazz musician, yearning for his dad to come to see him play, and later disappointments that appear to be his genetic destiny. The offstage events between Troy’s final scene and the confrontation between Rose and Cory create their own aching loss. Some of the omissions and the staginess are very well managed and effective. How about if the drama ranged further afield, with new scenes at Troy’s workplace, Cory’s school, Lyons’s club, or within Rose’s own life – and scenes showing Troy’s other woman, who is an ostentatious stagey absence? Because it’s possible to admire the technique and the stagecraft and the poetry of the speeches while also feeling them to be perhaps too weighty.
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And yet, at the risk of being facetious or sacrilegious, I can’t help wondering how it would look if they decided to make an actual movie based on August Wilson’s stage play … instead of this impeccably respectful filmed record. There isn’t a single weak link in the cast, and Fences is dense with intelligence and compassion. As a baseball king, he once swung for the fences, those limits of glory that now seem very far off. He nags at Cory to help him mend a fence, and broods that some fences keep people in and others out. Troy himself is scared of dying, scared about his illicit relationship with another woman, scared his sons will turn on him the way he once turned on his own dad.
Brain trauma in the second world war reduced Gabe to a second childhood, and his character periodically shows up to inject the action with instant pathos, sometimes interrupting anguished moments of dialogue, poignantly unaware of what’s happening. His house has been bought with disability money awarded by the army to his learning-impaired brother Gabe (Mykelti Williamson). Stephen Henderson plays Troy’s drinking buddy Bono, who is audience and enabler for Troy’s big-headed, big-talking flights of fancy.īut Washington shows how Troy is contorted with guilt and shame. Study and practice rule out doing chores or getting an after-school job. Jovan Adepo is the smart, sensitive younger son, Cory, infuriating his dad with plans for a college football scholarship. Russell Hornsby is Troy’s older son, Lyons, a wastrel who comes around on Troy’s payday looking for a loan, but evidently a talented jazz musician. Viola Davis brings her formidable charisma and presence to the role of his wife, Rose, to whom Troy keeps making extravagant and gallant gestures of affection. He struts and swaggers with that distinctive Washingtonian walk, angling his body forward with a jolt or jut of the pelvis and hips, like a challenge. But he is not so much bitter as bleary and cynical – wounded moods that he overcomes or suppresses with charming and almost Falstaffian good humour and a big appetite for the booze. He claims his vanished glory never gave him so much as a “pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of”.
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Troy was once a baseball star in the professional “Negro leagues” but never made it any higher, a disappointment he ascribes to racism.
The action is mainly restricted to his back yard and kitchen, where the painful, primal scenes of domestic tragedy are to take place. Washington himself plays the lead, Troy Maxson, a middle-aged African American in 1950s Pittsburgh working as garbage collector. But sitting down to this movie sometimes feels like being told to eat up your healthy green vegetables.
It’s impossible not to respect the integrity of the performances. (His Oscar nomination is posthumous.) And how daunting those speeches might have looked on the page to the actors in rehearsal – great dense blocks of text.
It is an adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning 1983 stage play, which has been long in the making the screenplay was completed by the dramatist himself before he died in 2005. Fences is a fervent, prolix, stately but beautifully acted drama, its exteriors lovingly photographed in a richly sunlit honeycomb hue. P roducer-director-star Denzel Washington brings his passion project to the screen with distinction, and it’s been rewarded with four Academy Award nominations: picture, actor, actress, adapted screenplay.
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