Honorable, worthy and windy, “Fences” is essentially a PBS episode of “Great Performances” that is inflated for the big screen without ever quite belonging there.
Not so much a film based on a play as a film of a play, “Fences” is directed by and stars Denzel Washington, who has brought with him almost the entire cast of the 2010 Broadway revival production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson, who died in 2005 but receives sole screenplay credit here.
Washington takes a reverent approach toward material that is at its best a penetrating character study of a garrulous mid-century Pittsburgh garbage collector named Troy (Washington) who is trying to steer his son Cory (Jovan Adepo) away from a sports-focused existence like the one that ended in dejection for the old man. He might have been a star baseball player if only the big leagues had integrated a few years before they did.
Troy’s wife, Rose (Viola Davis, in yet another soul-stirring performance), steers him toward compassion for the boy and for his musician older son (Russell Hornsby) from a previous relationship, as Troy’s brain-damaged brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson) wanders in and out of the scenery, being pathetic.
Troy is a large and multifarious figure, which is fortunate because he is pretty much all there is to “Fences.” Every other character (Stephen Henderson plays his best friend) in this largely plotless piece exists solely to reflect on Troy as he alternately teases, rebukes and justifies himself to the others. Many viewers will recognize their own fathers in the character: He is prideful, sinful, unduly harsh, often admirable in his self-sufficiency but ultimately unbearable. He is a product of his times, wounded if unbroken by racism, but he is also an enemy to himself. He is somewhere between King Lear and Willy Loman.
Washington plays the character with gusto, but as a director he never reconciles the competing demands of screen and stage: He allows huge monologues to dominate as scenes drag on, often culminating in choices that may work fine amid the inherent artifice of the theater but come across as ham-fisted on film.
A lengthy declamation by Troy built around a baseball metaphor stretched past the breaking point is, for instance, simply woeful, as is a scene in which family drama is overdetermined by the presence of a thunderous storm in the background. Gabriel, who brings things to a back-alley climax by blowing on his rusty empyrean trumpet, is an example of such blatant symbolic signaling that he is nearly laughable, with Williamson’s man-child performance amounting to one long cliché — the magically mentally challenged figure who invites us to wallow in pity.
In a film that is meant to get at some honest truths about black American life, these stagey and corny contrivances matter, but such a figure is Troy that attention must be paid. Ebullient, exasperating and implacable, he must be one of the most complex black men ever presented on-screen.