Adapting a play is a tricky thing. A musical adaptation leaves plenty of room for interpretation—songs are built-in flights of fancy, which directors can manipulate in infinite ways to fit the cinematic form. But straight plays present more of a challenge: what often works in the belief-suspended world of the stage can seem flat or staid on-screen. Two years ago, John Wells took the volcanic American stage masterpiece, August: Osage County, and turned it into a drab, lethargic film. Wells tried to expand the play’s physical purview too much, and stuffed his film full of movie stars to telegraph the text’s importance at the expense of the text itself. Though relatively unadorned, August: Osage County still served as reminder that, oftentimes, the simplest route is the best one when adapting from stage to screen.
Denzel Washington, a third-time film director, finds that simplicity in his adaptation of Fences, perhaps the most enduring work in the late August Wilson’s 10-play cycle chronicling the black experience in 20th-century America. It helps immensely that Washington, working with a screenplay by Wilson that got some massaging by Tony Kushner, is less doing an adaptation than he is making a transfer: the cast of the film, including Washington, is mostly the same cast that won raves and Tony Awards for a 2010 Broadway production. Washington smartly adds few frills to his film, letting his camera capture the tumult and poeticism of Wilson’s words as they are. Fences is a master class in one kind of adaptation, the “just get out of the way” school of letting a play breathe on-screen.
All Fences really needs is a backyard, with the added context that the yard is in Pittsburgh, in the 1950s. Washington plays Troy Maxson, a garbageman in his mid-50s whose life has grown and hardened around an old wound. In his salad days, Troy was a burgeoning baseball star. But he got waylaid by prison, and when he re-entered the free world, he was too old for a career playing ball. So he swallowed and absorbed those regrets, turning mean and pontificating as he aged and cobbled together some kind of family. He’s got two sons: Lyons (Russell Hornsby) is in his 30s and dreams of a jazz career, while Cory (Jovan Adepo) is a straitlaced teenager who wants to play high-school football in the hopes that it will take him to college and beyond. Troy is powerless against the resentment he feels for both sons, needling Lyons about his shiftlessness and haranguing Cory about the tough mechanics of the world, denying the boy access to a system that Troy feels (rightly, and wrongly) was rigged against him.
By Troy’s side during all this bluster and speechifying is his wife Rose, played with centeredness and solidity by Viola Davis, in a role that won her a Tony and very likely could win her an Oscar. Fences is a story about lots of things—race, class, ambition, defeat—but as a narrative it could be read as chiefly about a marriage buckling and fracturing. Troy, so magnificently made manifest by Washington, is a bitter, vainglorious monster, and the great journey of the play, of the film, is Rose deciding that she’s had enough of his histrionics. Davis plays that quaking and realization beautifully, with enough theatrical spitting and yelling to fit the proportions of Wilson’s towering monologues. Washington is also brilliantly pitched in that stage-y frequency, whipping up tempests of language that give Fences a dizzying heft.
The film only rarely overstates its case. Wilson’s brand of capital-D Drama may not be to everyone’s liking (not everybody likes Arthur Miller, either), but there is undeniably something skillful and incisive in how Washington makes this big stuff work within the deceptively small confines of film. Movies can show us enormous wonders, but they lack the theater’s immediate capacity. So it’s rare to see a film like Fences, which captures the stage play’s bracing melodrama without straining the seams of its form. Washington, working with cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, builds a closeness and a fluidity that make for a surprisingly limber film, one that never, or at least rarely, feels silly or cramped. That’s really difficult to pull off, and based on Washington’s earlier directorial work, I wasn’t sure he could do it. But Fences appears to have stoked something within Washington as a director, a focus and insight to match his room-shaking work as an actor.
Washington doesn’t devour the film, though. He gives ample room to Davis, whose character gradually moves toward the center of the story. And there is space for fine performances from the rest of the cast, especially from Adepo—a promising young talent who’s the newbie of the group, having not done the show on Broadway—and from Wilson mainstay Stephen Henderson, playing Troy’s weary best friend with knowingness and humor. Only Mykelti Williamson, playing Troy’s brain-damaged brother, Gabriel, doesn’t quite work, but that’s more a fault of his character than his performance. Gabriel is the most theater-y of the play’s creations, and he doesn’t survive the translation to film, no matter how carefully he’s handled. Still, the Fences ensemble is one of the strongest of the year in film, treating weighty, indelible words with appropriate gravity. Fences is not a subtle experience, but it has a persuasive confidence in its grand convictions.
The film gets a bit wobbly and even overindulgent toward the very end, when a certain mythos begins to form around the idea of Troy that is far less thoughtful, and less fair, than what’s come before. But Washington largely succeeds at a feat that has felled many other directors. It was no doubt a help that Wilson adapted his own words into a screenplay—but much of the work is Washington’s own, a delicate calibrating between text and medium that deftly threads a difficult needle. There are places where Fences puckers and swells, but Washington mostly keeps things at just the right scale. He tells a big story that is comfortably, convincingly set in a humble backyard—albeit a backyard cluttered with the heavy stone of human drama.
