Review: Piano Lessons – Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott | The Saturday Evening Post

Piano Lessons

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG-13

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes

Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher

Writers: Virgil Williams, Malcolm Washington (From the play by August Wilson)

Director: Malcolm Washington

In movie theaters; airs on Netflix on November 22

Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival

A powerful mix of family and historical dramas – with a twist thrown in – Piano Lessons explores the human pressure to hold on to the past while thinking about the future. Based on one of August Wilson’s three plays set in black Pittsburgh, this film continues to play a popular stage role while establishing itself as a powerful piece of make movies.

Arriving in 1936 Pittsburgh from Mississippi with a truckload of melons they plan to sell to starving Pittsburghers, Boy Willie (John David Washington) and Lymon (Ray Fisher) – a pair of young farm workers – arrive they knocked on Willie’s sister Berniece’s door. (Danielle Deadwyler).

Berniece is excited to see her brother – but things take a turn for the worse when she learns he’s in Pittsburgh and not just selling watermelons. He also wants her to sell a family heirloom: the upright piano that sits in her living room. Willie explains that he needs the money, along with the money from the watermelon, to buy a farm at home. It’s a bold and daring thing for a Black man to do in the Depression-era South, but Willie has big dreams. All he needs to accomplish them is for his sister to go along with the plan.

But this is not a normal thing. The relaxing wooden piano stand was made by their grandfather who was a slave, who painted a portrait of his wife and son. In a cruel act, they were taken to other fields to be given the same piano.

Years after slavery ended, Willie and Berniece’s father returned to the former slave’s home and stole the piano, claiming it was rightfully his – and was killed on Sutter’s orders, the son of the first slave. Understandably, Berniece will not part with the piano just as she is not willing to part with the painful family history.

There are many discussions between brother and sister about holding on to the past versus letting it go to make way for a better future. Acting as spokesperson is the family patriarch, Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson), a Pittsburgh landlord, who understands Willie’s longing but sympathizes with Berniece’s adherence to the piano, even as she refuses to lift the keyboard cover. for fear of releasing the ghosts of the past.

Also, it turns out that there is one ghost associated with the piano that is still at rest: that of Sutter, the man who killed Berniece and Willie’s father. It seems that Sutter fell mysteriously into his well years ago – aided, many believe, by someone bent on revenge for the death of the man he had ordered killed.

It’s hard to imagine a plot denser in both plot and subtext than that Piano Lessonsand it is a tribute to Wilson’s genius – and Malcolm Washington’s steadfast guidance – that we never lose sight of the weeds of fraternal conflict, generational memory, national conscience, and eternal responsibility.

Editing a big screen play is not a simple matter of setting up a set and positioning your camera. With the exception of the sequence to open the white wound during the Fourth of July post-war celebration, almost every design of Piano Lessons takes place in the dining room, kitchen, living room, and attic of Doaker’s cabin. But the film never feels cramped: every action is precise and fast. From time to time, Washington lets his camera wander, circling a table or following a character from room to room, giving an interesting cinematic sense of intimacy. . But overdoing it can make the audience aware of the presence of the camera. Washington cleverly allows the power of closure and clever editing to convey Wilson’s drama on screen.