Movie Review: Fences

In my screening of Fences, the audience gasped four times, piercing a sustained, attentive hush. You could read further, but geez, if you need a better recommendation than that…

Hearing a crowd audibly exclaim is one of cinema’s great communal experiences. It’s what makes Fences a must-see at the movies, even though it began life in another medium, and flat-out defies some of film’s inarguable fixings. There are no explosions, yet, thanks to the gargantuan talent of its cast, there are fireworks.

An adaptation of the late August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Fences barely ever leaves the back-porch of the Maxson family home in 1950s Pittsburgh.

Who could possibly care when we’re being offered a front-row seat to Denzel Washington and Viola Davis going toe-to-toe on the big screen? It’s the Backyard Acting Olympics.

Washington, directing from Wilson’s script, stars as Troy Maxson, a garbage man who coulda been someone—specifically, a baseball champion—if White America had only let him (and maybe if his personal demons hadn’t delayed and hardened him too).

Circumstances instead saddled him with a back-breaking job, a doting wife, Rose (Viola Davis), and a son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), whose skill with a football could see him succeed where dad failed.

Troy grumbles over the fact he never paid for his home; it came courtesy of a government payout after his brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson) returned from the war with a metal plate in his head.

Nonetheless, he still tries to live honourably, and by some manner of code, passing advice along to a defiant Cory, as well as Lyons (Russell Hornsby), his eldest son from an earlier, more volatile marriage.

Over many months, Troy toils on a fence Rose has requested for their yard, maybe because she senses Troy’s impatience with his lot in life. As his friend Bono (Stephen Henderson) warns, “Some people build fences to keep people out, and other people build fences to keep people in.”

Troy is as complex as characters who never stop talking get; a bloviating, charismatic terror. In two hours and twenty minutes, my opinion on him oscillated wildly. He’s not good, but he’s not all bad either. He is a champion of obligation, a victim of compromise and a conductor of dread. He is the result of his circumstances—personal and social—so, who do we blame for how he's made, and what he does? Answers don’t come easily.

Washington won a Tony for playing him in 2010. He might very well win the Oscar now. They’ll need to build a new statue for what he’s doing here. Denzel is titanic. Some may say he’s too big. Some also holiday in Rome and never visit the Colosseum. I can't help any of these people.

Davis won a Tony for playing Rose on Broadway too, and they’ve basically already inscribed her Academy Award. Her centrepiece sequence, an anguished monologue punctuated by a torrent of tears and snot, is indeed stunning; however, watching her elsewhere alternate between sweetness and firmness on a dime is like watching someone run suicide drills and never sweating. True, acting isn’t an endurance contest; that's doubly true if you’re up against Washington and Davis. Everyone else can collect their participation ribbons at the theatre exit.

Much like Glengarry Glen Ross, Carnage and Doubt, Fences can't help but feel like a play. That’s no criticism of the execution, or any suggestion that its returns are diminished somehow. You can simply feel the difference in its shape; the lack of a three-act structure; the divide where an intermission would have been.

Washington gets additional credit, as director, for emboldening his actors to invest full-throatedly in their performances, despite removing the heavily-stylised material from the intensity of a live environment. He doesn’t contrive too many scenes set outside of the Maxsons’ house, instead trusting that Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s camera, when trained on his individual actors at precisely the right moment, in precisely the right position, will be enough to keep us rapt. He is correct. It's called 'making a movie'.

4.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated PG for mild themes, sexual references and coarse language.