This review was first published on September 13, 2024, as part of the Toronto International Film Festival. We are now republishing coinciding with The Piano Lesson’s premiere in theaters.
In Malcolm Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, we witness the potential hazards and rewards of taking over a cherished theatre. Wilson’s protagonist was given wider spatiotemporal coverage than what the play offered as the director explains how he got convinced to work alongside Williams to record the screenplay. This perspective is enhanced as his father Denzel Washington was Carlos Wilson and directed what was anticipated to be a sequence of adaptations from Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle. In 2016, that was certainly true when Wilson directed a vision that was honored in the Pittsburgh cultural adaption of Fences. However, the son has opted for a different approach. In building his first feature film he looked for a wider frame through the work while seeking to maintain a physical style in the movie. He sought such ‘opening up’ as an assisting goal and did not look to rush straight into it. Piano Lesion which is set to premiere on Netflix suggests a change in the usual assumption that one faces when they watch the play or a movie. When such blessed occasions occur there is a level of satisfaction that is hard to describe. At the same time, Wilson is unhappy with the degree of adaptation and change made to his play and the contradiction inherent in film and theatre.
John David Washington, who is Malcolm Malcolm’s brother, portrays the determined character Boy Willie who appears with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) at his sister Berniece’s place turning the whole narrative upside down. Penned down by Wilson, the story takes place within the four walls of a Pittsburgh home and flashes back to the Mississippi years of Boy Willie. He is a sharecropper who had spent a significant part of his life in prison, hoping to earn money to free his ancestors’ land which domestically holds traumatic memories of slavery. The car is infamously known to be in shambles as it is crammed with watermelons, something these men carry up from Mississippi in 1936, in turn creating havoc in the household of the uncle, Samuel L Jackson, and the brother, John David. This trio then goes on an adventure that changes everything, with the sister Pians being sold to buy houses, thus carrying gold from the past bygone era. Even though grant piano due to its complicating problems Akin to the boy, Louise despises letting its hand out or allowing neighbors to even touch it as she hasn’t played in years.
Their standoff turns into a form of troubling and pain when they are forced to question their history and ideal of moving on or moving forward.
John David Washington’s frenetic performance made perfect sense on the stage, where projection comes with the territory. In this area, there is a strange reason to it as well: Boy Willie’s clamorous insistent sometimes sounds as if he is trying to persuade himself to do the right thing. It also makes for a nice contrast with Deadwyler’s Berniece, whose melancholy solidity in the face of Willie’s exhortations adds a whole extra level of conflict. This film version feels like it has built Berniece’s character up more. And unsurprisingly, Deadwyler, one of only two major cast members here who did not take part in the Broadway revival of 2022, is stunning in the part. The film indeed almost tends to become entirely her version.
Overshadowing everything else on stage is the fact of the presence of the piano that is elaborately decorated with the tragic features of Boy Willie and Berniece’s ancestors who were enslaved. But that’s the stage and the beauty of presence in life. In his movie, Washington stretches this metaphor across a broader timeframe. It was the evening that Boy Willie’s father took the piano from the white family who had it — and to begin with, the date of the vodcast is set on July 4, 1911. It is mostly a good option, not only emphasizing the importance of the instrument early on, creating the premise for the story, but also corroborating the case of Boy Willie and his object, the instrument, that is so personal for him, and so troubled: We see him as a child sitting back and history in the making.
Portraying flashbacks can be a tough task, and the result is usually mixed, out of the many flashbacks The Piano Lesson has, some were memorable and impactful, but others fell flat. Doaker illuminating the piano’s significance and the family’s background grabs the audience’s attention; there is a great scene where Jackson performs the stage role of Boy Willie which adds context to the story as a whole. Inter-cut flashbacks, while irritating, do not hurt one’s understanding of the overall plot, however, one’s grasp on the characters and the plot starts to deviate. The focus slowly shifts from the man telling the audience the story to the story that is being told.
This is the most central issue for this film. Riching the original The Piano Lesson with other scenes while maintaining Wilson’s words is illogical because they were intended for the theater. The rhythm and cadence of Wilson’s words evoke the theater because that was the only world that existed back then. This phenomenon is very common when it comes to reading theatre scripts and plays, the language of The Piano, then, only makes sense in a stage’s atmosphere, and together with the dialogue and words, creates entirely new worlds. And so, even from the beginning, one must be prepared to stop thinking about realism and start imagining. If not, then you will feel as if you are being pulled apart by the conflicting monologues and the acting.
In a peculiar turn of thoughts, Washington and Williams could have beaten more ray by throwing everything out the window and starting all over again, from scratch with the movie. That would have been an infringement. But some liberties have to be taken with movies from time to time. Unfortunately, and fortunately what the filmmakers have ended with instead, holds on to some of the wonders of August Wilson, as Smith’s ‘The Piano Lesson’ does, largely film fluff, and at times gets quite dramatic and well. It rests uneasily between the two forms, not quite enough in either to be called either one or the other.
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