'The Piano Lesson' review: A stage adaptation makes powerful use of cinematic form

Based on the August Wilson play about the complex weight of Black lineage, Malcolm Washington's feature-length directorial debut, The Piano Lesson, fittingly breaks a family curse. It's the third Wilson adaptation produced by the director's father, Hollywood superstar Denzel Washington — after Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Fences, the latter of which Denzel also directed — but it's the first to fully succeed as cinema.

Set in the mid-1930s, the story follows a pair of siblings who come into conflict over what to do with a slavery-era heirloom: a piano that one of them hopes to sell in order to buy his own land, while the other tries to hold on to it. With a powerful cast at his disposal, Washington directs the hell out of Wilson's stage play, and transforms it into cinema by filling out its margins.

This does, at times, lead to a literalization of the show's looming metaphors (the play has fantastical elements that the film practically transforms into horror), and the movie often suffers from some awkward assembly. However, Washington's remarkable visual approach transcends the two predecessors in his father's ostensible trilogy. Rather than simply filming a stage show in three dimensions, as was the case with Ma Rainey's and Fences, Washington uses his camera to interrogate the confines of the text, and builds on Wilson's Pulitzer Prize–winning play in impeccable ways.

What is The Piano Lesson about?

With a script by Washington and Virgil Williams, The Piano Lesson is a faithful adaptation of its 1987 source material, though the writers add bookends to take the narrative outside the confines of its central setting. Most of the story unfolds in the Pittsburgh home of widow Berniece Charles (Danielle Deadwyler), where she lives with her uncle, Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson), and adolescent daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith). However, the movie opens with a flashback to 1911, depicting a key event recounted later in both the film and the play: Doaker and Berniece's father stealing their family's precious piano from a former plantation in Mississippi.

This heist takes place on the Fourth of July, a fleeting detail in Wilson's text that Washington turns into an opportunity for deeper reflection. Fireworks paint the characters in washes of red, white and blue, forcing consideration of what "freedom" really means, in a story where financial and emotional liberation are constantly at stake. Back in the '30s, the financial constraints of the Great Depression leads Berniece's brother Boy Willie — played by the director's brother and Tenet star John David Washington — to her doorstep, accompanied by his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher). The duo has made their way to Pittsburgh to sell watermelons off the back of their truck so Boy Willie can purchase a plot of land, but gathering the money would also require him to sell the piano his father stole. It's an object to which Berniece still clings even though she doesn't play it, a contradiction Deadwyler sells convincingly by turning the quiet moments between her dialogue into moments of intense personal dilemma.

This piano is special, for carved into its body — by Berniece and Boy Willie's great grandfather, an enslaved woodworker — are the faces of enslaved relatives who were sold to acquire the instrument, alongside depictions of their family's history. Part keepsake and part painful albatross, the piano remains central to several scenes and conversations that play out over a number of days, as Boy Willie and Lymon stick around in the hopes of convincing Berniece to give it up.

Along the way, numerous characters with whom the family shares a history come and go from Berniece's household, resulting in scenes of catching up, reminiscing, and even arguing, as Washington finds unexpected ways to explore Wilson's rhythmic dialogue.

The Piano Lesson adapts the famous stage play with flair.

Like any good stage-to-screen translation, The Piano Lesson retains room for its actors to play. As soon as any two of them interact — with initial excitement that eventually gives way to more complex feelings — entire histories between them are clarified through the smallest of gestures. Washington doesn't mess with this formula, born of Wilson's thoughtful writing, and instead compliments it by allowing his cast to craft spontaneous performances.

As Boy Willie, John David Washington's rapid-fire dialogue lays track immediately before the charging locomotive that is the movie's plot, but he constantly laces his heavy exposition with infectious effervescence. When he finally slows down for more difficult dramatic scenes, moments of silence envelop the soundscape, and he practically warps the movie's texture around him, making its drama almost suffocating. All the while, the camera follows him through the lower floor of Berniece's home, between the kitchen and the living room, as he chews the scenery while bringing light and life to the setting. He does so via friendly conversations with Doaker and his other uncle, Wining Boy (Michael Potts) — a once-famous musical artist dealing with disappointment — and via more adversarial verbal tussles with the local reverend, Avery Brown (Corey Hawkins), who's smitten with his sister.

As a director, Washington unearths the intimacy of each conversation by either gradually circling around the characters and capturing their collective energy, or by holding on them in close-ups for long periods — and in unexpected moments. Rather than keeping the lens trained on whoever's speaking, he diverts our attention to reaction shots, building a more interpersonal story in the process, as characters respond to each other's recollections or to new information.

There is, however, a slight downside to just how in tune Washington is with his performers. The movie's moment-to-moment construction suffers on occasion; in order to capture the actors' spontaneity and their performances at length, shots feel inelegantly stitched together, with objects and bodies obscuring enough of the frame that it's momentarily distracting. The rhythm of Wilson's words is maintained, but the rhythm of the editorial cuts feels strange in the process; movement and blocking feels directionally correct, but the cuts from one character to the next become jarring in the process. Most viewers may not notice some of these individual instances, but the result is a compounding effect that subtly unsettles the audience.

However, the movie swerves into phantasmagorical territory often enough that these unsettling breaks in visual melody end up feeling part and parcel of its approach. A ghost happens to be haunting Berniece, or so she claims. Its historical meaning grows increasingly clear as the dialogue reveals more about the family's history, and in the meantime, Washington's horror-inspired flourishes create intrigue. Although he grants the play's invisible spirits corporeal form, cinematographer Mike Gioulakis obfuscates them in shadow for just long enough that they still remain mysterious. The film's use of light is often marvelous, veering between stage-like spotlights emanating from fixtures overhead, to warm glows that don't just softly illuminate the actors' faces but work in tandem with the echoes of the sound design to draw out internal thought from their performances. The family's legacy is constantly on the tip of Wilson's tongue, and Washington further elucidates this subtext through the characters' self-reflections, which attempt to draw out internal thought in moments of deep self-reflection on the family's legacy.

The Piano Lesson wrestles with the past.

The eponymous piano has an enormous presence throughout the film, whether as a central element of production design — characters often lean on it or inspect it as they speak — or even as a lurking entity in the background and out of focus, lying in wait to cause a rift between the siblings. It is, at once, a reminder of the demonic white supremacy that defined their family's lives, as well as an embodiment of the continued resilience of those very same people.

In effect, the piano embodies the weight of history for the Charles family as Black Americans, for whom slavery is only two or three generations removed. They occasionally speak of this burden, but the dialogue is enhanced by the movie's use of flashbacks to decades before. As Doaker tells the story of the piano, what he's really recalling are the recollections of other characters — or recollections of recollections — since he hadn't been born until after slavery was abolished. And yet, the edit ties his words to this flashback footage as though we were witnessing his own memories.

The flashbacks in question involve fleeting, expressionistic images, both of woodworking and of enslaved people glancing at the camera, à la Barry Jenkins' The Underground Railroad. In the process, Doaker and the Charles family become a sort of conduit between the audience and the film, the play, the Depression-era setting — during which monetary survival was a topic on everyone's tongue — and eventually, the family's ancestors, whose lives have been preserved in wood.

More importantly, by expanding on Wilson's text though cinematic form, Washington more closely connects each character to the spiritual quandary the piano represents. Selling it would mean moving forward, as Boy Willie's ancestors would have hoped for him, and it would also mean putting generations of pain behind him. However, for Berniece, it would also mean forgetting the past. These opposing forces are inextricably linked in the consciousness of Black America, and the movie brings them to light in stunning dramatic form, through a film that makes living room chats feel like enormous proclamations that echo through history.

Combining the best of stage and screen, The Piano Lesson finds deft balance between overt melodrama and dazzling aesthetic flourishes. Through light and sound that guide and shift alongside the story, Berniece's home — and the film as a whole — come to life, transforming the screen into a living stage where practically any emotion can be expressed. 

The Piano Lesson is currently in select theaters. It will debut on Netflix Nov. 22.