Adaptations of plays aren’t cinematically doomed. One of the best movies of the past year, “Moonlight,” is an adaptation of a play (sort of); so was the best movie of 2015 (“Chi-Raq”); so is the best movie ever (“King Lear”). Denzel Washington’s film “Fences,” an adaptation of the play by August Wilson, could well have yielded an excellent movie rather than a turgid one, and consistently inspired performances rather than merely virtuosic ones. It goes without saying that the actors in “Fences,” among them Washington and Viola Davis, are some of the most talented and skillful in the business. But Washington’s filming of the play, despite his evident deep commitment to it, is far less imaginative and less original than Wilson’s creation of the play; the performances resemble theatrical ones and spurn the distinctive exhilarations of movie acting.
Most of the action in “Fences” takes place in one family’s back yard and house—the one belonging to the Maxsons—in Pittsburgh, in the mid-nineteen-fifties. Troy Maxson (Washington), a fifty-three-year-old sanitation worker, is fighting racist restrictions that keep him as a hauler and prevent him from becoming a driver. A vitally energetic man, he’s also fighting his past—a former baseball star who couldn’t play in the major leagues because of segregation, he harshly keeps his younger son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), from playing high-school football and being recruited for college football. He’s hard on his older son, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), a struggling musician; he helps to care for his older brother, Gabe (Mykelti Williamson), who was wounded in the Second World War and was left mentally impaired. His best friend and colleague, Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson), his sidekick since younger and more troubled days, is a regular presence in his life. Above all, Troy shares his life with his wise, loving, and tireless wife of eighteen years, Rose (Davis), whose steadfast devotion to him is tested when he has an affair—and a child—with another woman.
“Fences” maintains a theatrical sense of scenes and acts; despite its realistic settings and some moments that expand the action into the street and further into the city, it may as well have a curtain to separate them. Movie acting involves position in the frame as much as diction; distance from the camera as much as gestures; angles, light, costume, décor as much as expression. Even more, it’s a matter of tone: the creation not of an imaginary world onscreen but of an actual, unified environment that encompasses what’s on camera and what’s behind the camera. The mark of a failed adaptation is that it leaves a sense of dependence on the source material without making that relationship explicit or developing it in any significant way. Washington, as director, neither emphasizes and heightens the artifice of the theatrical premise nor counteracts it by pressing the physicality of the actors to the fore.
The performances in “Fences” lack intimacy; they feel as if they’re being addressed to audiences in the far balconies, not to one another as actors, not to one another as characters, and not even, as a mode of thought, to the text or to the image. The actors are always on—not on camera but onstage, always needing to do something to be looked at, to sustain an illusion of continuity and a solid block of characterization that the movies don’t require. Movie acting is rooted in innate personal charisma, but the actors in “Fences” (who have plenty of it) assert their presence as if to fill out the space of the stage with the force not of their personal character but of the characters they play. These exertions render the actors absent rather than present; despite their vital energy, deep commitment, and majestic skill, they vanish into the characters and the characters melt into their traits, or, rather, into their dramatic functions. The performance of the text seems like figure skaters’ compulsory routines, not freestyle ones; Wilson’s glorious language, carefully yoked to the drama, doesn’t evoke the emotions that the actors are experiencing but merely substitutes for them.
The best thing in “Fences” is the talk that floats free from the drama—the opening chat between Troy and Bono on the back of the garbage truck, its riffing and ribald continuation in the Maxson back yard with Rose joining in; Troy’s talk with Bono and Lyons about growing up in the Deep South amid family trouble, which turns into Troy’s great monologue about how he came to be on his own at the age of fourteen, walking to Mobile and facing injustices of segregation that he found shocking and that changed the course of his life; and Rose’s great monologue near the end about the inner bargain that she made in marrying Troy. The best single moment in the movie belongs to Davis, when (I’ll avoid spoilers) she reaches a breaking point in her relationship with Troy. It’s a moment so quiet and casual, despite its dramatic thunder, that it seems to need the camera and the microphone to catch it. Though Davis turns toward the camera at that moment, her turn, with her eyes lowered, has such abandon that it seems as if the actress herself had, in a moment of utter possession, forgotten it was there. Davis’s genius is to infuse the high drama with such natural spontaneity; it’s a moment of shared inspiration, Davis’s as actor and Washington’s as director, that displays the spontaneity, the ferocity, and the risk of transformative cinematic freedom that’s lacking in the rest of the film.
It’s the one moment in the film that reaches the heart of theatrical cinema—the moment in which the text itself seems transformed into images. Theatrical performance isn’t antithetical to movies; it’s essential to them—especially when it’s pushed to the extremes that distinguish theatre from movies, when it captures the fear factor of the stage. The thrill of theatre is the sense of menace, of the actor leaping from the stage into the audience, of the actor’s own potential danger. If movies, as Jean Cocteau said, are “death at work,” the theatre is work that confronts the imminent possibility of death. Calamity onscreen can be edited out; calamity onstage is an inescapable shadow. Actors directed to deploy and surpass their technique infuse movies with this existential menace, but “Fences” stays within the bounds of its calibrated performances; the actors never threaten to break out of the characters and burst through the screen with explosive physicality.
“Fences” has already won its actors a slew of awards from critics’ groups as well as a couple of Golden Globes nominations. (The ceremony is on Sunday night.) I don’t think these accolades are simply a matter of the honor that’s due the actors themselves, the sheer pleasure in seeing them do such ample and substantial work, although offering awards in praise of great ongoing careers is worthy in itself. Rather, highly rehearsed and technically precise performances of the sort seen in “Fences” mesh with critics’ own familiar technique, the habit and ease of evaluating work in terms of definable standards. Movie acting is a miracle. Onscreen power often emerges full-blown among accidentally discovered performers with little training and little technique; what’s frightening about it is that no effort can develop it—or keep it. The virtuosity of theatrical craft, by comparison, is reassuring in its transmissibility and manageability; it’s nearly quantifiable, which allows critics to play teacher and assign the equivalent of a numerical grade. But the greatest movie acting is too mysterious to be measured. In theatre, actors give; in movies, actors are taken from. In “Fences,” the actors give and give and give; their devotion to Wilson’s words and world is—with only a few exceptions—more moving and more immediately human than their embodiment and development of the characters they portray.
