First time watching Piano Lesson it was in a brilliant, well-placed screening room inside Netflix‘s main campus Hollywood. During a scene where four men gather around a whiskey bottle in a Pittsburgh dining room and sing a prison labor song about their shared and unforgettable history in Mississippi, I was moved—literally. Every time the men stomped their boots on the ground, my chair shook so violently that I wondered if there was an earthquake. As the empty whiskey clinks on the table‘s on the edge, I was sure it would fall on my head.
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THE PIANO LESSON ★★★ (3/4 stars) |
When I watched it again this weekend at my house, I streamed the movie‘permanent home on Netflix, the scene remains a stunning display of the great power of playwright August Wilson.‘The vision and great talent of the cast, all four of whom were reprising their roles in the 2022 Broadway revival.
But when separated from the darkness of the theater and its booming sound system, the unforgettable moment lost several levels of its intensity and intensity. That historical sense of grabbing you by the throat was still there‘it’s all but impossible to extract that quality from any replay of Wilson’s performances‘s Pittsburgh Cycle—but the grip on the throat wasn’t nearly as tight as it should have been.
In adaptation Wilson‘s play, writers Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington, who also directs, begin before the beginning, confirming the stories and characters named by the audience.‘s imagination in stage productions.
We see for the first time Boy Charles (the magnetic Stephan James, who appears They were again If Beale Street could talk) as he carried the great hero of the Independence day of 1911, running away from the iron that was with his family.‘s history recorded by his grandfather, and traded with his family members. Shot in richly colored shades of black by cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, it’s an incredibly moving sequence and one of the film’s.‘better times to open Wilson‘a wonderfully contained game.
With Boy Charles a victim of racist violence, his brother Doaker (a wonderfully relaxed Samuel L. Jackson, history about the game dating back to its first production in 1987) now lives away from all things Pittsburgh, and Charles.‘ daughter Bernice (Danielle Deadwyler) and daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith). A piano with the blood and tears of their ancestors, perhaps cursed by the ghost of its previous owner, is sitting in the living room untouched by all except Maretha who does not know its history.
Their urban idleness is interrupted by the arrival of Bernice‘the younger brother of Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), whose jalopy is overflowing with watermelons at home. Willie‘s plan: sell the watermelons, convince Bernice to sell the piano, then use the money to buy the land that once belonged to the family that owned their ancestors. The problem? Bernice has a good chance to sell that piano as she is about to throw herself into the well, the fate that befell most of the men who killed her father.
Washington gives a haunting performance as a man possessed by the idea that owning the land his family toiled over will solve all of life’s problems. This character is not responsible in the opposite way given the pressure the character was under; His father (Denzel) is a producer, his brother (Malcolm) made his directorial debut, and the boy opposite him (Jackson) started his role.
Danielle Deadwyler, who is doing well in 2022‘s Until, she is even better as Bernice, a character equally haunted by her family‘s past and your present. Evoking the complex emotions his character doesn’t know what to do with, Deadwyler speaks words that have been part of the repertoire of American theater for nearly four decades as if he invented them on the spot.
The film ends with appendages that don’t sound much louder than the ones that kick them off. When one character is thrown down the hallway by a bloated mirror with blood coming out of its eyes, you might wonder if you’ve accidentally stumbled upon a movie stream with a bunch of horror movies that have crowded Netflix’s algorithm.
Just as some movies should always be seen in the theater, some ghosts are even scarier if they only exist in your head.
