Film: "Fences"
Denzel Washington and Viola Davis star in this screen adaptation of August Wilson’s spellbinding drama set in 1950s Pittsburgh.
This textually rich, spellbinding drama tells the story of Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington), a Pittsburgh garbage man who comes home from work every day and holds court in his cramped backyard with his friends and wife (Viola Davis), railing about injustices both big (racism) and small (the baseball career that never happened). It’s a play of poetically heightened realism, with amusing down-home chatter, soaring monologues, boisterous drunken riffs and blunt dramatic confrontations in which Troy bitterly and sometimes cruelly draws the lines between him and those closest to him—especially his youngest son, whom he is determined to keep from wasting time going to college on a football scholarship.
A.O. Scott praises Denzel Washington for both his performance and his direction: “Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play…his voice is a mighty instrument, and if you closed your eyes and just listened to Fences you would hear a verbal performance of unmatched force and nuance” (NYT ). D: Denzel Washington, US, 2016, 139m
