The Piano Lesson

After Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Denzel Washington’s third portrayal from August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle which he has produced is The Piano Lesson. Moreover, it’s the best one too. This time, it is a family affair.

The film stars Washington’s oldest son, John David, and is directed by his youngest son, Malcolm. Two of his daughters — Katia and Olivia — have also taken part, as a producer and in a small acting role respectively. And as the credits rolled, there was a tribute to the children’s mother Pauletta. It may be called projection, but it is reasonable to feel so when we see the children trying to get to the bottom of this tale. The Piano Lesson is about a husband and a wife, who just can’t get along over how best to split the inheritance which has been gifted to them by their parents along with their grandparents.

In his own powerful way, Washington (Malcolm) begins the chapter with a series of visually impressive scenes that could be called montage. It is July 4, 1911 in Mississippi. While outdoors white landowners whose roots hail from the hands of savages enjoy shrill and loud fireworks announcing the US’ independence, one of the young black men led by Boy Charles (Stephan James of If Beale Street Could Talk) ventures to ransack their pre civil war home. Boy Charles’s aim is to seize the heavy intricately designed Wilson’s centerpiece- a piano that resonates their family bond from slavery through the intricately designed wood carvings towards a time when the family was no more in servitude.

During this moment, while these men are pulling and pushing the piano from the den of the Southern household to an oxcart on the ground, they are, in effect, bathing in the back-splashes of explosion in the sky. As rockets trace arcs against the sky and break into colored light peaking Duke Jacob, a momentous scene unfolds as these men, possess their heritage. True, there’s a certain flourish to the manner, as one who shoots for the very first time, but this is quite al right and quite effective.

Even when it comes to the set design, which is most believe is only one-sided almost entirely occurring in a modest midges in Pittsburgh in the year 1936, it remains invigorating when Washington gets the opportunity to escape – whether it is from that context or the earthly context. He integrates high aesthetics when Wilson’s play, on the story of a brother and sister’s conflict over the piano, turns out to be dreamlike and more delicate. But more so, how his intimate compositions of different forces erupt in tension makes for a better reflection of his elevate potential. One of the actors gently brushes her hand against another actor’s face, pauses momentarily before drawing near for a kiss and hesitates just a tad bit before contact which makes the audience swoon. Or the way he captures Daniella Deadwyler in the most meager, rawest shades, and the tiniest of gestures – that work. Berniece, as portrayed by Boy Charles, is a slick-headed heat captivating the audience like the center of a still life that has come off the canvas.

Deadwyler, the Till star who should have received an Oscar nomination almost two years ago, continues her Ontario Tour, the only player in the main cast who. She attended the original broadway revival of The Piano Lesson in 2022. Returning Members are led by Judith’s younger brother Little Willie who comes to Pittsburgh with a truckload of watermelons to sell and a report that another Sutter (the same family that enslaved their forebears) has fallen into a pit. Sutter has lost face and can now sell land. Willie has plans to sell the family piano for money, an idea that makes Berniece furious. She also believes that Boy Willie is the one who assisted Sutter in breaking his spine. Perhaps this is why the foul image of the decaying white man now haunts their family’s house in, it must be said amusing scenes that borrow heavily from the latest so-called elevated horror stylizations.

Boy Willie is a very resourceful hustler, in which case Washington is often all cocksure and in his devivery as if he is addressing the last row seated in the auditorium. It has been better done by Samuel L Jackson in the movie who played Boy Willie in the theatre, where he was the protagonist. Uncle Doaker is level-headed on the other hand, who adopts a humorous but ill-informed neutrality about disputes that supernaturally revolve around the piano and its phantoms.

Ray Fisher, who had much disgruntlement with Joss Whedon and the whole ensemble of Warner Bros in Justice League, shows up here as Lymon, Boy Willie’s admirer, who is great but unfortunately rather dumb. Well, Michael Potts gives back the favourite portrayal of Wining Boy, Doaker’s sibling, who seeks gold of course humor and sometimes surprising comic relief, but most importantly, solace from his woe at the end of each drink.

It’s a fine line between the comic aspects and the dramatic in Wilson’s play which, in The Piano Lesson for the most part, leaves the larger emotions feeling a bit lost amidst the laughter. This is a complicated narrative, however, of two people trying to come to term with the trauma of their family and the pain within.

You cannot spell piano without pain. Boy Willie’s dogged refusal to part with the family heirloom is an attempt to liberate himself from the ghosts of the past and slavery’s shadows and utilize the cash to help him pursue a future of self-reliance. For Berniece however, who bears the stain of the ancestors’ sacrifices, she is emotionally trapped in the past. She’s in the process of grieving a spouse and looking for the path to move forward.

Even their pent-up emotions, which Washington, the director, renders during an amusingly chaotic ghostly reckoned achieving a different kind of catharsis, do not reinforce the tension. The film struggles throughout its entirety to combine the real feelings of humans with the extreme surreal spectacle that is supernatural.

As impressive as some of the moments are, Washington really gets it in one shot, which comes at the moment when the men gather in a circle at a table and start singing the prison vernacular ‘Berta, Berta’, and the film becomes a sort of a musical for a few seconds. They begin to thump their feet, the camera twirls around capturing the rhythm of the railroads. It is so astounding that real people are singing this in such circumstances. This moment is so raw and so poetic at the same time; it is the image of men who are trapped by their circumstances, reaching with their voices for the sky.

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