The Piano Lesson Can’t Quite Live Up to August Wilson’s Play

This review was originally published on September 13, 2024 out of the Toronto International Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timed to The Piano Lesson’s theatrical release.

You’ll see all the perils and profits of opening up a beloved piece of theater in Malcolm Washington’s film adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Piano Lesson. The director, who co-wrote the screenplay with Virgil Williams (Mudbound), has chosen to embellish Wilson’s legendary play with extended flashbacks and location changes and genre-friendly pyrotechnics. He’s enhanced certain characters and downplayed others. Malcolm’s father, Denzel Washington, who has taken on the overall project of transforming Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle into individual films (and is credited as a producer here), achieved great success with a very faithful adaptation of Fences back in 2016. But the son has chosen a slightly less reverential path. Making his feature debut, he doesn’t just want to open things up; he wants to find a more cinematically expressive and expressionistic way into the work. There is a sweep to this Piano Lesson (which will debut on Netflix in late November after a brief theatrical release) that one might not immediately discern on the page or the stage. When it succeeds, it’s impressive. But it also can’t hold a candle to Wilson’s original, and it can’t reconcile the fundamental tension between theater and film.

Wilson’s play takes place inside a Pittsburgh home, where the outgoing and strong-willed Boy Willie (John David Washington, Malcolm’s brother) and his awkward pal Lymon (Ray Fisher) show up unannounced late one night in 1936. The home belongs to Willie’s older sister, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and his uncle Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson). Boy Willie and Lymon have just driven a rickety truck full of watermelons up from Mississippi, where their family is from. A sharecropper and ex-con who remained in the South while much of the family migrated North, Willie aims to make enough money to buy up the remaining land back home, where their ancestors were enslaved; to do so, he wants to sell the giant hand-carved piano in Berniece’s house, which has a troubling, possibly supernatural connection to their past. Willie insists on taking the piano, but Berniece refuses to let it go, even though she hasn’t played the instrument in years. To him, it’s an object that has caused pain and can be exploited to move forward. For her, it’s a transmitter to those who came before them. Their standoff becomes one partly about confronting history, about the pain inherent in both moving on and hanging on.

John David Washington’s frenetic performance made perfect sense on the stage, where projection comes with the territory. There’s an odd logic to it here, too: Boy Willie’s clamorous insistence feels at times like he’s trying to convince himself that he’s doing the right thing. It also makes for a nice contrast with Deadwyler’s Berniece, whose melancholy solidity in the face of Willie’s exhortations adds a whole extra level of conflict. This film version feels like it has built Berniece’s character up more, and Deadwyler, one of only two major cast members here who didn’t also appear in the 2022 Broadway revival, is quite stunning in the part. The movie effectively becomes her story.

On the stage, the piano — ornately carved with the haunting faces of Boy Willie and Berniece’s enslaved ancestors — is an inescapable physical fact, looming over the action and dialogue. But that’s the stage, and the magic of live presence. For his film, Washington spreads the metaphor across a wider timeline. He opens with a scene set on July 4, 1911, depicting the night when Boy Willie’s father stole the piano from the white family that owned it. It’s a mostly effective choice, not just establishing early the significance of the instrument but also reinforcing Boy Willie’s personal and tortured connection to the object: We see him as a young boy, watching all this unfold.

Other flashbacks aren’t quite as successful. In the play’s most bravura scene, Doaker explains the origins of the piano and its significance to this family. On stage, Jackson (who also originated the role of Boy Willie back in 1987, when The Piano Lesson debuted at the Yale Rep) commanded the audience’s attention with weary indignation. Here, presented with intercutting flashbacks, the gist of his story doesn’t lose its power, but the words somehow do. It becomes less about the man telling the story and more about the story itself.

That’s the central challenge of this film. It adorns the original The Piano Lesson with all this extra material but still chooses to preserve most of Wilson’s words, which with their rhythm and their evocations remain in the world of the theater. Like most great plays, The Piano Lesson’s language cannot easily be divorced from the enclosed atmosphere of the stage; that is where it belongs and begins, where the power of these words conjures entire worlds. (Wilson was, after all, also a poet.) Watching the film thus becomes an occasionally dissonant experience, as the filmmaking pulls us in one direction and the theatrical dialogue in another.

In some weird way, one almost wishes that Washington and Williams had been even more brutal and rewritten the whole thing, completely reimagining it for the movie screen. That, of course, would have been sacrilege. But sometimes movies need a little sacrilege to achieve their full potential. To be fair, what the filmmakers have ended up with instead retains enough of the wonder of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson to be worthwhile and occasionally quite moving. But it lives uncomfortably between two forms, not quite enough of either to qualify as one or the other.