DIRECTOR Denzel Washington
CAST Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Mykelti
Williamson, Russell Hornsby, Saniyya Sidney,
Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jovan Adepo
PLOT An adaptation of August Wilson’s award-
winning play in which fiftysomething garbage
collector (and almost-pro baseball player) Troy
Maxson (Washington) struggles with a fatigued
marriage to Rose (Davis), a strained relationship
with his son (Adepo) and the crippling weight
of past disappointments.
OUT 9 FEBRUARY
RATED PG / 139 MINS
★★★★★
FENCES
NEVER MIND VIDEO games, plays
are the real tricky beast when it comes to
wrangling ilm adaptations. Too literal and
they are simply a retreading without a live
audience; too cinematic and they become
warped, a new kind of wood from the bark
from which they were born.
So expect to see much made of Fences
being ‘too stagey’, but believe that — along
with its rich heart — its strengths are its faith
to the source material and staunch refusal
to throw in ilmic architecture or bombastic
cinematography to warrant its place on screen
and your backside on a seat.
It’s Pittsburgh in the 1950s. It’s Friday, it’s
payday, and as their shift hauling trash ends,
Troy (Washington, who also directs) and best
friend Bono (Henderson) do what they do
every Friday: sit in Troy’s back yard and weave
intricate, bawdy stories, half-drunk bottle of ginin hand, before being joined by Troy’s wife of
18 years, Rose (Davis). With little in the way
of action in that stark yard — or even physical
movement — it’s a irst act Washington delivers
pretty much single-handedly, dense dialogue
tripping from his tongue with the beat and the
bounce of poetry. At times, you could swear you
hear jazz. Here, Washington is tilling the earth by
hand, laying the soil even for the story set to
unfurl before us.
Troy is a man stitched together from the hurt
of his irst ive decades on earth — a promising
ballplayer who, through institutional racism (and
perhaps other factors more of his own doing)
was robbed of the chance to go pro. This is only
one welt he carries close to the skin (see also the
fact that there is no black sanitation truck driver
in his company), but the one that continually
raises to the surface, as fresh as when it was irst
made. It’s felt in every decision, every spat word,