After the success of 2016’s Fences and 2020’s electrifying Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Denzel Washington’s latest adaptation of playwright August Wilson is a distinctly family affair, with the star’s youngest son, Malcolm Washington, taking on directing duties, and his eldest, actor John David Washington (Tenet; BlacKkKlansman), leading the cast. (Washington’s wife, Pauletta, and daughter, Olivia, also make small on-screen appearances.)
And with its story of siblings squabbling over a potent family legacy, you might argue that The Piano Lesson is a perfect fit for everyone involved.
First performed in 1987, Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama was the fifth instalment in his widely acclaimed ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’: a series of 10 plays that reckoned with strands of Black American history throughout the 20th century, and which the elder Washington has dedicated himself to bringing to the screen.
As in the play, the bulk of the movie’s action takes place in 1936, when Mississippi sharecropper Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his buddy Lymon (Ray Fisher) arrive at the Pittsburgh home shared by his older sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler, Till) and their uncle, Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson, who played Washington’s role in the original 1987 theatre production; they both starred in the play’s 2022 Broadway revival).
Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his older sister, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), don’t see eye to eye when it comes to the piano. (Supplied: Netflix)
More crucially, it’s also the current residence of the titular — and highly valuable — piano, for which Willie and Berniece’s father had been killed after stealing it from a slave owner’s mansion back in 1911. Willie intends to sell the fabled instrument in order to buy land and start a new life back down South, much to the consternation of Berniece, for whom the piano represents an essential piece of the family legacy.
Not that she ever tinkles the ivories herself. An emblem of a deeply fraught chapter in recent history, the piano — which is engraved with the likenesses of several generations of Black slaves — was once the prized possession of a Southern landowner, who traded his servants in order to acquire it for his wife.
If that wasn’t enough, the piano appears to be tethered to the malignant spirit of the deceased slave owner, whose ghost has been haunting Berniece and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (newcomer Skylar Aleece Smith).
The slave owner’s ghost haunts Berniece and her daughter, Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), through the piano. (Supplied: Netflix)
The tension between processing or profiting from the trauma of the past drives Wilson’s drama, which unfolds as a battle for both a family legacy and, by extension, the future of wider 20th century Black culture.
Why not transform this totem of slavery into the means for independence, goes Willie’s argument; why hold on to an instrument that serves as a vessel for so many evil spirits, some of them apparently quite literal?
Before you know it, this slow-burn family drama has taken on a transcendent, almost supernatural dimension.
The movie’s weight lies in Wilson’s words and the performances of the ensemble cast. (Supplied: Netflix)
Unlike the music-heavy Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which was supercharged by simmering performances from the likes of Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman, The Piano Lesson never quite manages to escape its theatrical limitations. Nor does it necessarily need to.
For all of Washington’s nervy camera work, an anachronistic soundtrack featuring tracks by Frank Ocean and Fela Kuti, and side excursions into sweaty jazz clubs with guest star Erykah Badu, the movie’s weight lies in Wilson’s words — and the strength of the performances conveying them.
Proving that his blustery brand of bravado — last seen in Sam Levinson’s divisive Malcolm & Marie — is a key component of his performance style, John David Washington plays Willie as a hustler whose charm barely conceals his desperation.
Washington’s Boy Willie is a mix of charm and desperation. (Supplied: Netflix)
Jackson, too, is in the pocket as the avuncular storyteller of the piece, as are the supporting players — particularly Michael Potts (also reprising his role from the 2022 stage production) as Doaker’s comical older brother Wining Boy, a faded musician drowning himself in booze and memories who brings the house down leading a stomping mid-film singalong.
They’re all great, but the movie unquestionably belongs to Deadwyler, whose bracing performance is the heart and soul around which everything else revolves.
Danielle Deadwyler shines as Berniece. (Supplied: Netflix)
Bearing the burden of ancestral trauma — to say nothing of the scheming of the men around her — Berniece is the fulcrum for the film’s knockout finale, in which the living and the dead commune in a spiritual maelstrom that echoes across generations.
In a movie that takes on the demons of the past, it feels like nothing short of an exorcism — and proof of the enduring power of Wilson’s work.
The Piano Lesson is showing in cinemas now.