Tropic Sprockets / Fences

Tropic Sprockets / Fences

By Ian Brockway

August Wilson’s striking and highly emotional play “Fences” comes to the screen as a project decades in the making.  In the film version, actor Denzel Washington himself directs, reprising his role of Troy Maxon, a very bitter man, now a garbage collector, who once had dreams of becoming a professional baseball player.

Washington directs with great care and verve and no elements are extraneous or superfluous.

Viola Davis reprises her stage role as well as Rose, Troy’s self-sacrificing wife, as does the excellent Stephen Henderson as Troy’s loyal friend, Bono.

Suffice to say that home is not where the heart is.

Washington has great range seeming amiable and folksy with his buddy Bono and his spouse, only to boil over with a diseased resentment against his athletically ambitious son Cory (Jovan Adepo). At times Washington is a genuine monster—violent and petty—and all the more so with just his voice. To see Troy walk around his small Pittsburgh yard circa 1950, is to know fear. All traces of Denzel Washington and his usual hero persona are gone in an instant.

Also perfect in the film is Mykelti Williamson as Troy’s disabled brother Gabe, who is brain damaged from combat in the war. As a man who sees angels and hell-hounds, who inspires pity and mystery in Troy’s dog-eat-dog life, Williamson very nearly steals the film.

Viewers take caution. This is very tough content with each showdown becoming more and more intense. In other hands, such drama could well reach unreal heights. Washington’s  strength as actor and director is that he shows Troy Maxon completely as he is with a good deal of envy, but also with a hint of human happiness. One feels that Maxon could at any time better his life. Will he be an accepting husband and father, or a selfish imp, willful with spite?  Better still, we have a sense of the otherworldy, of devils and demons  and crucifix-iron barriers, all given without supernatural means.

Just as in a play, Washington the director forces our imagination to work to envision the added biblical drama.

Gritty, shoulder-tensing and anxious, “Fences” is a wonderful ensemble film and a remarkable achievement for Denzel Washington. The great spirit of August Wilson (who wrote the screenplay before his death in 2005) would be proud.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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