One of the Year’s Best Films Just Quietly Hit Netflix
Guillermo del Toro once said, “History is ultimately an inventory of ghosts.”
Given enough time and accumulated experience, any family can lay claim to a whole litany of potential specters, either in the literal sense of loved ones or hated ones that have passed on, or in the sense of opportunities lost and chances missed that you might grieve as if they were a living soul come and gone.
This past weekend, Netflix quietly released The Piano Lesson, a new adaptation of the acclaimed August Wilson play directed by Malcolm Washington (son of Denzel) and starring John David Washington (son of Denzel), Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher, Corey Hawkins, and Michael Potts as the scattered members of a family with such an anguished history that it takes some doing to determine which specific ghost is currently doing the haunted.
But have no doubt: This is indeed a haunted house.
Sitting at the intersection of theater and cinema, fusing a verbose family melodrama with the visual language of a ghost story direct from a Conjuring sequel, The Piano Lesson is one of the year’s best films.
One of the ten plays in August Wilson’s legendary Pittsburgh Cycle (two of which, Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, have already been brought to screen by Denzel Washington, serving as producer/director/star of Fences and producer on Ma Rainey’s and this film) The Piano Lesson centers on a feud between Berniece Charles (Deadwyler) and her brother Boy Willie (David Washington) over the fate of a prized family heirloom: the exquisitely hand-carved piano currently gathering dust in Berniece’s living room.
It’s 1936 and slavery is a barely faded memory. A former slaveowner by the name of Sutter has recently died, freeing up his land for auction. Boy Willie plans to sell the piano and use that money to purchase the land which his family formerly tended to when they were enslaved. But Berniece refuses to be parted from the piano: Not only has blood and life been spent in the claiming of the instrument, but their family history is literally carved into the piano’s body.
Sitting ringside to this contest are uncles Doaker (Jackson) and Wining (pronounced ‘whining’) Boy (Pitts), Willie’s affable pal Lymon (Fisher), and aspiring preacher/aspiring claimant to Berniece’s hand Avery (Hawkins).
As far as set-ups go, it’s a doozy. The conflict that Wilson lays out is perfectly conceived so that both perspectives make complete sense even as they are fundamentally incompatible. Of course you understand why Willie would endeavor to use the piano to rewrite history and build a brighter life and future. But of course you also understand why Berniece feels such a profound connection to the piano as a link to the past, especially after Doaker lays out the tragic history behind the piano, its carvings, and the method by which the Charles family obtained it. There’s no ‘wrong’ and no ‘right’ to this, just two people with irreconcilable attitudes for how to deal with the legacy of pain they’ve been handed to live with.
You don’t need me to extoll the virtues of August Wilson’s playwriting (unless you do, in which case: He was good at it) and The Piano Lesson is, by my understanding, largely faithful to the dialogue and action of the text. This is crackling, masterful dialogue, delivered by an ensemble all playing to the best of their abilities (much of the cast already worked with this material during an acclaimed Broadway revival in 2022).
But how does it play (haha) as a movie? It is, after all, 2.5 hours largely spent in a single room. This the third Denzel-produced go-round with adapting Wilson to the screen, and as with both Fences and Ma Rainey, you can at times feel Piano straining to open the world of the story up beyond the structures and limitations of a stage-bound work. Because the cast is operating at such a high level, and because the cramped, murky set works well with the Gothic-adjacent tale being told, you can’t help but feel a sense of deflation whenever Piano leaves the house for interstitial sequences of the characters going about their lives and routines before returning home for another round of fireworks.
As director, Macolm Washington has the confidence to keep that straining to a minimum. Whereas Fences and Ma Rainey often felt like they were putting in too much work to add variety to where the verbal duels unfolded, Malcolm finds the cinema within a contained space. Without calling attention to his camera, he keeps the images dynamic, using the blocking and layout of the ensemble in relation to one another to inform his frames. The camera is always keeping track of who is in command of which scene, and to where/who the momentum is shifting to any given time.
Nowhere does the cinema come through more loud and clear than in maybe the film’s standout sequence: A late night drinking session between Boy Willie, Doaker, Wining Boy, and Lymon. Everyone is sitting except for Willie, with his boundless energies and enthusiasms, doing laps around the table and stirring the pot. They’re trading stories about a prison farm where each man has spent time, cracking jokes and busting balls, having a fine time of it. Then Willie starts up singing a work song from those days in the prison field until one by one the other men start joining in. Director Washington and editor Leslie Jones (not the Ghostbuster) give this scene a rhythmic pulse, cutting on stomping feet and pounding hands, the pace growing faster and faster as emotion overtakes each man until the singalong has become an exorcism: eyes fill with tears, necks go taut, voices choke and fill with rage and pain finally Finally FINALLY being set loose even if only for a moment, only for the space of a song.
With a film like this, there’s nowhere for a weak cast member to hide. Fortunately, everyone in The Piano Lesson elevates their craft to meet this material at its level. It took me a minute to adjust to the drawling voice Ray Fisher is doing, but once I got used to it, the boundless warmth and longing of his performance shone through.
Lymon and Avery are the outside perspectives on the Charles’s family conflict, and Corey Hawkins turns in a masterclass of reaction shots and double-takes to add much needed levity to the often fraught proceedings.
Danielle Deadwyler has been quietly assembling a filmography that’s just one excellent performance after another, and here she holds the center of the movie down as the immovable object around which everyone else orbits. In a movie stuffed with big men giving big performances, Deadwyler exerts a quiet power. And when her reserve does falter, it’s all the more impactful.
As the more or less permanently soused Wining Boy, Michael Potts gets some of the broadest material in the film, but Potts works a magic trick by keeping even the showiest and loudest moments tied to a recognizably human and deeply sad core.
And what is there to say about Samuel L. Jackson? That he’s one of the best actors alive, if not ever? That should go without saying, but Samuel L. Jackson is such a ubiquitous presence in cinema that it can feel like we forget just how special an actor he is. So, just to say it and be sure that it has been said: Samuel L. Jackson is one of the best actors alive, if not ever, and he is magnificent in The Piano Lesson. Doaker is the quietest, calmest figure in the whole story, and yet Jackson is never not in command of any scene he’s in. Without doing anything to grab attention from his cast mates, Jackson understands perfectly the iconic weight he carries on screen and uses that innate power to control the volume of his every scene. The way he sits in a chair, the way he holds himself, the tilt of his head, it’s brilliant Big Screen acting even in a movie that was made for streaming.
So let’s talk about John David Washington for a second.
I’ve been a fan of the guy for a little while now, he is The Protagonist after all, but it’s no great leap to describe this as the best performance I’ve seen from him so far. Boy Willie is by turns a pure-hearted dreamer and an opportunistic snake in the grass. He never stops talking and never stops moving, charming enough to dominate an easy mark like Lymon but not enough to fully bend the world to his demands. He’s smart enough to understand the game is rigged, but not quite capable enough to cheat back or start his own game. John David understands everything that is likable and compelling about Boy Willie while also unapologetically owning everything craven and pathetic about him.
While John David Washington doesn’t especially resemble Denzel all that much, there are overlaps in the way father and son move and speak. It’s noteworthy in the abstract in other roles but here it really stands out given the connection with Fences.
If Fences was about a middle-aged man raging against the cycles of disappointment and failure that resulted in what he conceives as a wasted life, The Piano Lesson is about a younger man’s desperation to break those cycles before they have the chance to claim him. That thematic throughline was already there in Wilson’s work, but seeing it played out in the performances of father and son only underscores the wrenching emotion these characters are struggling with.
Not everything in The Piano Lesson fully works. A late in the game ghostly occurrence is realized with special effects one step removed from an early Supernatural episode, and the second half of the film drags a bit as the characters splinter into smaller groups meaning you go long stretches without the more lively influences keeping things heated.
But The Piano Lesson brings it all together for a grand slam of a cathartic finale that aims to leave audiences spellbound and speechless as John David Washington murmurs the story’s hopeful but broken-hearted punchline.
Netflix doesn’t seem all-too interested in getting the word out about it, but The Piano Lesson is one of the year’s best films, and you should make the time to watch it as soon as possible.
