![]() ![]() 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. He might have been a star baseball player if only the big leagues had integrated a few years before they did. 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. 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. 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. ![]() Rated PG-13 (adult situations, profanity, suggestive references). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |