The Piano Lesson Review: LFF 2024
The Charles family legacy is up for debate in The Piano Lesson
The Piano Lesson is the debut feature film from director Malcolm Washington and he’s made it a real family affair, casting father Denzel and brother John David alongside Samuel L Jackson, Danielle Deadwyler and Ray Fisher. It’s adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same name by August Wilson. Notably, Denzel Washington scored Best Actor and Best Picture Oscar nominations for his work in a previous Wilson adaption – 2017’s Fences – so no doubt the family will be hoping to strike gold again.
In 1930’s Pittsburgh estranged siblings Boy Willie Charles (J D Washington) and Berneice Charles (Deadwyler) are reunited when Boy Willie travels up from Mississippi to sell a truckload of watermelons with his close friend Lymon (Fisher.) A plot of land owned by his recently deceased neighbour has come up for sale, and Willie is trying to raise the money to buy it. As the money from the watermelons will not be enough, he hopes to convince Berneice to sell their family heirloom piano to make up the rest.
The beautiful instrument hides a dark past. Originally belonging to the family that kept the Charles family enslaved, it is carved with the faces and history of their ancestors. After Willie and Berneice’s father had stolen it in the dead of night some twenty years earlier a series of mysterious deaths had occurred, and rumours abound that either the piano or the Charles family themselves are haunted. As the siblings argue about what to do with the piano – for Berneice is refusing to part with it – strange and ghostly happenings start to occur.
The Piano Lesson concerns itself with the legacy of slavery and how the different family members choose to remember that legacy. For Berneice the piano is a sacred item – her family paid for it with their blood, her grandmothers own face is carved into the wood – she can’t imagine the idea of parting with it and letting go of that history.
For Boy Willie the ultimate way to respect their ancestors is to grow; he dreams of owning the land their grandparents were once enslaved on and writing a new legacy. He claims clinging on to the past will only keep them beholden to it.
For much of it’s run time The Piano Lesson fails to escape its stagey roots. Much of the drama happens in a single location – the living room of Berniece’s house – and characters are wont to go on long, dramatic monologues that sometimes feel a little too prewritten to be real dialogue. Deadwyler steals every scene she’s in with a powerhouse performance, but John David Washington feels like he’s hamming it up for the back row of an auditorium – his performance would come across well on stage but doesn’t feel natural enough for the movie version.
As we approach the third act things take a decidedly supernatural turn and there’s suddenly no longer any doubt about the validity of the ghost story claims. The tonal shift feels quite jarring but for me at least was a welcome change of pace, the circle of ‘big monologues’ getting a little repetitive.
The ensemble scenes between both Washingtons, Jackson and Fisher are the highlight of the film, with a particular moment where the four sing a work song together absolutely humming with energy, but much of the rest of this drama is largely unremarkable. An uneven multi-genre pic, it nevertheless has some moments of brilliance from its all-star cast; and the addition of the supernatural ghost story takes it to a really unexpected conclusion.
The Piano Lesson is playing at the BFI London Film Festival 2024. It will be out in cinemas on 8th November 2024 before streaming on Netflix from 22nd November 2024.
Responses