Movie Review: Samuel L. Jackson at home in Denzel Washington’s The Piano Lesson

Danielle Deadwyler, left, as Berniece and John David Washington as Boy Willie in “The Piano Lesson.” Photo / David Lee/Netflix

Review

What: The Piano Lesson

Reviewer: Ty Burr

Verdict: 2 out of 4

The Piano Lesson is a Washington family affair: Denzel producing, son John David starring, other son Malcolm directing, older daughter Katia on board as executive producer, and Malcolm’s twin sister, Olivia, in a small role. Together, they wrestle August Wilson’s totemic 1987 stage play to the screen, and I regret to report that Wilson does not come out on top.

The film is adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning fifth entry in the playwright’s Pittsburgh Cycle (aka The Century Cycle), 10 plays set in the city’s Hill District, one for each decade of the 20th century. Taken as a whole, they present a panorama of the Black American experience over 100 years — the still-fresh wounds of slavery, the Great Migration north, the ghosts that come along. Wilson died in 2005, and his widow named Denzel Washington official custodian of the writer’s legacy, with a deal in place with Netflix to produce film versions of all 10 plays.

The Fences adaptation (2016) was the first to come out, with herculean performances by Washington and an Oscar-winning Viola Davis (both re-creating their Broadway roles), followed by Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2020, directed by theatrical legend George C. Wolfe. The actor recently announced that Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone will be next to go before the cameras, but for now, The Piano Lesson offers a spirited-if-uneven testimony to the playwright’s great gifts.

Despite a soundtrack filled confusingly with 1970s-era soul music, the film is set in 1936, as America and especially its black communities struggled to emerge from The Depression.

The Piano Lesson revolves around the Charles family and a piano that has travelled north with them, heavy with the scars of history. Carved by an enslaved ancestor with the faces of his forefathers and -mothers, the instrument serves as a visual family tree and memorial to generations of suffering for Berniece Charles (Danielle Deadwyler), who shares her Hill District house with her uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson).

To Berniece’s brother Boy Willie (John David Washington), the piano is a relic of the past that only stands to bankroll his future. Boy Willie arrives from Mississippi at the start of the film, accompanied by the shy, “country” Lymon (Ray Fisher) and driving a truck full of watermelons he intends to sell.

With that money and the profit he expects to see from unloading the piano, Boy Willie hopes to buy the land his family slaved on for generations, the white owner, Sutter, having recently and mysteriously fallen down a well.

The play is thus a sibling power struggle that takes on titanic force, asking what these characters — and, by extension, an entire people — owe the past and what the past owes them. As with many of the plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle, The Piano Lesson is literally haunted, in this case by the newly arrived shade of the newly dead Sutter (Jay Peterson), who drips water and dread along the upstairs corridors.

Such supernatural visitations tend to play more believably on a stage than in the “realistic” medium of cinema, but that’s the least of the movie’s problems.

Samuel L. Jackson, who played Boy Willie in a 1987 stage production, settles comfortably into the role of Doaker, acting as the playwright’s wise stand-in. Photo / David Lee/Netflix

Those problems are twofold: direction that never finds a thematic through line or harnesses a consistent energy — the result is a film that lacks shape, despite its first-time filmmaker’s efforts to “open it up” with flashbacks — and a lead performance by John David Washington that’s pitched past the last row of the theatre and lands somewhere in the next time zone.

Thankfully, Jackson is on hand, and not only does the actor know this material inside out — Jackson played Boy Willie in the play’s initial stage performances at the Yale Rep in 1987 — but you can feel the actor’s relief at sinking his teeth into an honest piece of craft instead of his usual studio junk food. Doaker is the playwright’s wise stand-in, carrying the past with him but letting the younger fools fight it out for themselves, and Jackson settles into the role like the comfortable chair it is.

The revelation of this Piano Lesson, though, is Deadwyler as Berniece, a role filled earlier by the likes of S. Epatha Merkerson, Danielle Brooks and Alfre Woodard.

Deadwyler was the discovery of 2022′s Till as the mother of the murdered Emmett Till, and she brings an entwined combination of delicacy and ferocity to Berniece that at times leaves your jaw hanging open, not to mention a hidden tenderness in a scene with the sweet, slow-moving Lymon that just about breaks your heart.

In the end, it’s Deadwyler who provides the grieving, white-hot core around which The Piano Lesson fitfully revolves, and, if you ask me, the actress has grieved enough. Can someone give this woman a rom-com?