Eight years ago, as producer-director and star, Denzel Washington gave us an intelligent and deeply felt film version of August Wilson’s stage play Fences, a rich and resonant evocation of African American history. Now as co-producer only, Washington has brought another Wilson play to the screen, another weighty legacy project, perhaps. The Piano Lesson is the fifth in Wilson’s epic Pittsburgh cycle, adapting the recent Broadway production with most of the main cast. It’s another beautifully acted piece of work – though with a startling, even slightly baffling element of the supernatural, a melodramatic séance of strangeness that might have worked better on stage.
Denzel’s son Malcolm Washington makes his feature directing debut, co-writing with Virgil Williams, while Malcolm’s brother John David Washington stars as swaggering, ambitious, but emotionally wounded former sharecropper Boy Willie in 1930s Pittburgh, who has a plan to bully his sister Berniece (the perennially excellent Danielle Deadwyler) into giving him the family piano so he can sell it and buy the land he used to farm back in the south.
