Fences

Fences is a movie with a somewhat contradictory dichotomy at its core. On one hand, the film is a masterwork, a labor of love adapted from the late, great August Wilson’s award-winning 1983 play and engineered for the screen by Denzel Washington. Yet it’s also a somewhat pedestrian cinematic achievement. As a showcase for acting, it’s a marvel. As cinema, it’s less impressive, a picture that’s too devoted to its theatrical roots to fully translate the language of the theater into the language of the movies. It’s the definition of a filmed play, with Washington attempting to capture the heightened reality and immediacy felt in a live environment sans the live component of the theatrical equation.
To a point, this works in Fences, but non-cinematic modes for making movies have diminishing returns. After all, movies have their own set of storytelling conventions, and when those conventions are deemphasized, so, too, is the medium’s allure. Washington and his cinematographer, the talented Charlotte Bruus Christensen, shoot the film as simply and as intimately as possible, and their approach is a double-edged sword: It partially recreates the sensation of watching Fences in a theater setting but prevents it from telling Wilson’s story in the manner of a movie, eschewing complex or declarative compositions and angles for stability. The camera records the drama without enhancing it, remaining a stationary tool instead of an active participant in the film’s saga of familial friction.
If Fences adheres to a basic visual scheme, though, Washington and his supporting cast lend it dazzling, urgent life. (In a film like Fences, even actors as immensely talented as Viola Davis and Stephen Henderson will be thought of as “supporting.”) One may wish for more from Washington stylistically considering his history behind the lens (Fences marks his third time directing, following Antwone Fisher in 2002 and The Great Debaters in 2007), but he’s so busy giving his all in front of it that it is easy to look past the streamlined imagery. His talent as an actor benefits him most here, allowing him to foster an easy, palpable chemistry between his cast in their every scene. Maybe we don’t see movies like this for bravura direction. Maybe we see them for bravura acting, and for the poetically frank ways in which they express their core themes and ideas.
Fences is made of powerful and sadly relevant stuff. It’s important without announcing its importance, a movie that is stripped of pretense, with its significance wrapped in a disarming mundanity. Like Wilson’s 1983 play, Washington’s film is set in the 1950s. All the people and objects within it orbit Troy Maxson, a Pittsburgh waste collector who busts his ass every day to provide for his wife, Rose (Davis), their son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), and Lyons (Russell Hornsby), Troy’s older son and the child of his previous marriage. We learn right away that Lyons tends to appear on Troy’s doorstep every payday, but other figures habitually haunt his home, too: Mr. Bono (Henderson), his best friend and comrade at arms on the dustcart, and also Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), his brother, a soldier who took a grievous head wound in combat and now lives his days chasing away the “hellhounds” of his imagination.
Despite the size of Fences’ cast, it isn’t truly an ensemble work. By and large it’s Troy’s story, and by extension, Washington’s. Troy is the sort of person toward whom others gravitate, and as in Wilson’s play, he is the center of the universe in Washington’s film. And how could he not be? Troy is a force, a man with an undignified demeanor who fights like hell for his dignity every day, a lion draped in a garbage man’s coveralls. He’ll always take a chance to remind anyone within earshot that he doesn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of—not because he gives a shit about your pity, but because it is his mission to drive home the truth of his existence, be it to Rose, to Mr. Bono, to Lyons, to the audience, and most of all to Cory, who has aspirations and a plan for seeing his aspirations come to fruition.