The Piano Lesson (12A) |Close-Up Film Review

Denzel Washington has become the key cinematic champion of late African American playwright August Wilson.   After appearing in a revival of Wilson’s Fences on Broadway, Washington went on to direct and star in the Oscar winning film of the play in 2016. 

He was then instrumental as producer in bringing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to the screen,  which he has now done again as producer with The Piano Lesson, which is also something of a family affair, featuring as it does his sons Malcolm, making his feature film debut as co-writer/director and John David in one of the leading roles.

Set in 1936 in Pittsburgh, Wilson’s story, like others in his American Century Cycle of plays, deals with the Black American experience, particularly heritage and family.  The piano of the title is an important part of the Charles family history. Back in the days when their ancestors were enslaved on a plantation, one of them carved images of his family members into that piano, which later members of the family “liberated” from the slave owners’ descendants, back in 1911. 

The centre of the story is the conflict between Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and her brother Boy Willie (John David Washington), who wants to sell the piano to help finance his plan to buy back some of the land from that old plantation and make his fortune.   But for Berniece the piano is too important a part of who they are as a family to let it go. 

Attempting to keep the peace is their uncle and the family patriarch Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson), one of the family team who liberated the instrument back in 1911 and who now looks after Berniece, who is a widow with a young daughter. 

Also involved with the family are Boy Willie’s sweet natured friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), who carries a torch for Bernice and Michael Potts as Doaker’s amiable  brother Wining Boy, whose best friend is the bottle of his nickname. 

Malcolm Washington, who has already cut his directorial teeth on a number of short films, directs this, his feature debut with assurance, flair and sensitivity.  The acting is impeccable and exciting, particularly Deadwyler, so good in Till, as Berniece, hanging on desperately to a family history which hurts but which she values and cannot let go of.  John David Washington is passionate as her brother, ruthlessly determined to honour or perhaps erase that past by creating a successful present. 

The climax of the film is when the past appears to come back quite literally to haunt the family. Or are those ghosts produced just in the minds of its members, as an embodiment of their past traumas and a way to resolve them?