I love August Wilson's play—in fact, I just re-read it last month—but this film did not work for me. I guess I feel like the direction made a hash of what the story is about. I understand that The Piano Lesson is a ghost story, one where history is literally in the room with us, but for director Malcolm Washington that meant haunted house tropes of water running along the floor, flickering light bulbs, apparitions floating down wells, and scary music. Maybe this could have been ok, but the haunted-house approach seems to have been the only part of the story that Washington brought clarity to. The rest of the movie felt very confused to me, as if even the stuff in the play that isn’t about haunting is somehow also merely second fiddle to the horror-movie techniques he’s enjoying. So Berniece's bath sequence becomes a vaguely tense and troubling scenario rather than a sexy/romantic one, and even the watermelons feel loaded with scary ghost-meanings.
For most of the movie Washington is committed to his haunted-house, horror-film angle. And yet… all of a sudden we’re out at the nightclub and the movie version of The Piano Lesson becomes something else altogether—a wild dance party. And when we’re down in Louisiana the film’s style shifts yet again—a kind of strobe-lit wash of weird colors juxtaposed with faux-haunting CGI that isn't in accord with the same haunted-house language in the Pittsburgh scenes. It's four different movies, and this makes a bit of a mess of August Wilson's play.
I liked John David Washington’s Boy Willie. He’s pretty marvelous, but then I love him in everything, honestly. And of course Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts are solid in supporting roles. But the director just couldn’t choose a tone, and I think the film really suffers for it.
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