Review: Fences

Set in the 1950s, Denzel Washington plays a former Negro League baseball player who now laments that he was never able to reach the highest of highs. Now a garbage collector in his 50s and married for almost 20 years to long-suffering wife Viola Davis, he is hard-headed, arrogant, unwaveringly tough on his kids, and unfaithful in his marriage. Stephen Henderson plays Washington’s friend and co-worker, whilst Mykelti Williamson plays Washington’s brain-damaged brother, a gentle but erratic man who was wounded in war and has never recovered.

Some plays have made for perfectly fine movies (“12 Angry Men” in particular, is brilliant). Hell, on the odd occasion you won’t even be able to tell that the film you’re watching is a cinematic adaptation of a stage play. Then there’s a film like this 2016 directorial-starring effort from Denzel Washington that never for a moment ceases to be anything more than a filmed stage play shot occasionally out in the open. For theatre lovers out there, this may or may not be a problem. I watch and review films, have zero interest in theatre, and I found this an especially trying experience. I wanted to get lost in the story and disregard the medium/its origins, but because it’s a film that clearly plays in stagey fashion, I couldn’t escape into the world of the story. Denzel barely even tries to open this one up, and at no point does it convince.

It’s not shot on a stage, yet the actors behave as though it is, and that also means star Denzel Washington going all out loud so those in the back of the theatre can hear him. A rookie mistake, really from an actor who on occasion is capable of untouchable greatness. Here, the actor who won an Oscar for unconvincingly hamming it up in “Training Day” is mostly unconvincing as an African-American Willy Loman. Interestingly, in both films he uses the ‘N-word’, and in both films it sounds silly and fake coming from him. Maybe, for all his talent, Denzel has his limits. That’s no great shame, but he’s definitely not the right fit for this. Charles S. Dutton, Forest Whitaker, Jim Brown. Those guys I could see in the role. Maybe even Obba Babatunde. Denzel…nah. Even in his one good scene where he reacts to some bad news, it doesn’t come off as well as you’d want. That’s because he starts speechifyin’ again, and the brief glimpse at something beyond artifice is immediately shattered by stagey bullshit.

Viola Davis won an Oscar here for Best Supporting Actress, despite being the lead actress in the film. She doesn’t get a whole helluva lot here playing such a clichéd role, but when she does she shows Denzel how to really act. Given how great Denzel is capable of being, that shouldn’t be the case. Just watch “Malcolm X”, “Philadelphia” or “The Hurricane”…that’s real acting from Denzel. Reprising the role he played on stage (as are several others) he’s not awful, but what he does here is mostly empty hamming in a role he’s not the best fit for, in a medium that probably required a more subtle brand of acting than would be the case on stage, perhaps.

Adapted by the playwright August Wilson himself it’s also all talk, all the time. After about 6 minutes I wanted everyone to shut the hell up…and there was 2 hours of this African-American “Death of a Salesman” wannabe (or perhaps “The Great Santini”) to go still. Some great movies are entirely dialogue-driven (“12 Angry Men”, “All About Eve”, “Citizen Kane”, “When Harry Met Sally…”, “A Few Good Men”- the first and last of which are plays), but with the great ones you don’t actually notice that it’s all talk all of the time. You’re too engrossed in the story to think about anything else. That’s not the case here, in fact I felt I was trying harder to like the film than the film was trying to win me over. The fact that the main character is a total piece of shit doesn’t help, either. If he were an interesting piece of shit, that’d be fine (Ray Kroc in “The Founder” wasn’t an especially loveable guy, Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull” was a volatile loser thug, too). This guy’s a self-absorbed boring jerk who demands respect without ever doing anything much to earn the right for such a demand. I get that he’s self-loathing, but he’s also incredibly tedious so I didn’t care. Frankly, I would’ve preferred a film about Stephen Henderson’s laidback character instead. As for Mykelti Williamson, there’s a little Bubba to his brain-damaged character here, and while hammy, at least he was playing a genuinely appealing character.

As a director here Denzel doesn’t even make enough of an effort to let the audience know what time and place we’re in here. At times I even felt like the film itself was from a different era about another era still (possibly because the play was written in 1983). After an hour, I didn’t even really know what the hell this was trying to be about. A cranky old ‘coulda been a contender’ who never shuts up? So what? Sure, the screenwriter has to take some of the blame for that, but it’s ultimately Denzel at the helm and he’s not letting us in. It’s also histrionic and choppy as hell (there’s just no flow to the storytelling at all), surprisingly shoddy at times, actually. On occasion I had a hard time finding my bearings in a scene for that reason. As for all the baseball metaphors, I know it fits the character but it too feels too written, too artificial. Y’know the difference between a stagey film you go along with and a stagey film you resist? One is interesting. It really is that simple. Little moments here and there worked, but I wasn’t interested in the characters or scant story here overall. I wasn’t remotely interested in what they were saying, so all I could see was the empty artifice of it all. For 2+ hours of tedium. It’s exactly what I’d feared a film that has been written by the playwright themselves would play like.

Old-hat, stagey, unconvincing…what did people see in this? Were the Academy so scared of being labelled white-washers at the Oscars again that they nominated this underwhelming effort in four major categories as an attempt at compensation? It appears so to me, but theatre lovers may feel differently and respond very favourably to this film. I got nothing out of it at all and I’m not even sure it’d be much more appealing to me on stage.

Rating: D+