With perhaps the year’s best ensemble cast, debut director Malcolm Washington has crafted a film just as striking as the Pulitzer Prize-winning August Wilson play it’s adapted from. It also doesn’t hurt that Malcolm Washington is the son of Denzel Washington, who served as a producer on the film, as well as the brother of star John David Washington. Some may bristle at the nepotism involved, but in my view, Malcom Washington has immediately established himself as a wonderfully powerful cinematic voice. Plus, it’s actually fitting that The Piano Lesson is a family affair, because the play and the film are about dissecting what a family legacy means, both internally within one family and throughout history.
In 1936 Pittsburgh, the Charles family comes together when Boy Willie Charles (John David Washington; “Boy Willie” is the character’s nickname and how everyone in the family affectionately refers to him) and family friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) drive up from Mississippi with a truck full of watermelons to sell. Boy Willie intends to load the family’s beautiful piano into his truck and sell it in order to buy Sutter’s land. Sutter is a now-deceased former slaveowner, the one under whom the Charles’ ancestors — many of whom are immortalized in carvings on the piano — toiled. Boy Willie’s sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) believes her brother pushed Sutter down the well where his body was found, and in any event, she’s unwilling to part with the piano, even though she rarely plays it.
For Berniece, the piano holds probably the highest sentimental value any object could possibly hold. Her uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson), the owner of the house everyone’s crammed into for these few contentious days, doesn’t want to get between the two bickering siblings. However, he often takes Berniece’s side, partly because Berniece and her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) have lived with Doaker since the death of Crawley, Berniece’s husband and Maretha’s father.
The grief Berniece feels is bound up in the piano; she feels a literal spiritual connection to departed family through it. Malcolm Washington emphasizes that spiritualism of the play in such singularly cinematic ways. Though there are stagey elements here and there, director and crew bring a woozy, ethereal quality to the camerawork, as much as can be done within the confines of one small home. We do venture out occasionally, as with one lovely scene in a nightclub where Erykah Badu cameos as a big-band singer, but the palpable tension between the two siblings is driven by the close quarters of the house. Doaker’s humble abode feels unending in the hands of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, who employs a technique of swirling camera movement reminiscent of what he pioneered with It Follows. Whereas that film’s characters were stalked by fears of the future, this family subconsciously dreads the past.
This cast is just terrific. Danielle Deadwyler — the victim of an all-time egregious Oscar snub for her stunning work in Till just two years ago — is as commanding a screen presence as anyone has ever witnessed. She steps right into a main cast who have already played their respective roles together in a recent Broadway revival (Washington, Jackson, Fisher) and makes the movie completely hers. There are incredible scenes all throughout the performances of the other three leads, but every time Berniece and Boy Willie really duke it out, it’s just gold. Deadwyler and Washington bring so much of the story’s thematic material to the surface through gesture and cadence while never steamrolling Wilson’s dialogue, always honoring how much the words alone can carry a scene in his work.
Rounding out the cast are Corey Hawkins as Berniece’s will-they-won’t-they lover Avery and Michael Potts as Doaker’s elder brother Wining Boy (another nickname). Where Boy Willie, Avery, and Lymon are looking toward the future, Berniece, Doaker, and Wining Boy are only looking toward the past to some extent. The truth lies somewhere in the middle: our connections to the past are important, but we mustn’t forget to play the music right in front of us.
I don’t claim to be an expert on all of August Wilson’s work, but I can tell where a few plot threads were cut for time and where certain things were a little rushed. That’s part of what contributes to those stagey elements I referenced earlier. However, this film had a visceral, emotional hold on me, almost right from its enigmatic beginning. It presents itself as a bit of a puzzle, partly due to its time constraints as compared to the stage play, but it’s a puzzle I loved, both when putting it together and admiring its individual pieces. If The Piano Lesson doesn’t end up in my top five films of 2024, this will have been a uniquely incredible awards season. | George Napper
The Piano Lesson is available for home streaming on Netflix.
