The Piano Lesson movie review (2024)

“The Piano Lesson” is Malcolm Washington’s feature debut, a demanding adaptation of prolific playwright August Wilson’s evocative play of the same name. Joining a star-studded trio—his brother John David Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Danielle Deadwyler—Washington’s examination of legacy (trauma, wealth, and history) is a powerful portrayal of black ancestry in America.

The Charles family owns a generational heirloom, an upright piano engraved with the faces of their ancestors. The piano was originally stolen from the home of their former slave master, James Sutter (Jay Peterson), hoping to pass it down from generation to generation. Years later, in 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, Boy Willie (Washington) is heading north from Mississippi to Pennsylvania with his friend, Lymon (a charmingly suave Ray Fisher), hoping to retrieve and sell the piano to buy his own land.

Standing in his way is his sister Berniece (Deadwyler), who owns the piano and vows never to sell it, but barely dares to say a word about its history to her young daughter, let alone play it. As the siblings’ heads go under the roof of their rather ambivalent Uncle Doaker (a clever but familiarly sardonic Jackson), “The Piano Lesson” unfolds. The film seeks to bring together Berniece and Boy Willie’s familial conflict into a semblance of resolution about what black people should do with their history.

In this film, John David Washington is electric, full of galvanized spirit and ambition. His screen presence borders on overstimulating, and he becomes a fitting foil to Berniece’s perspective. His long-haired, colorful tirades and broad, energetic gestures feel like a speaker in his element, charismatic as hell, but ultimately uncomfortably preachy to Berniece’s stew-under-the-surface approach to her frustrations. Their characters couldn’t be more juxtaposed, and Deadwyler’s performance is equally affecting in its restraint, even though Berniece is no less empowered than her brother. Deadwyler is tight, her neutral stance hardly ever taking up more space than her frame takes up. Her postural rigidity points to Berniece’s oppression as well as her righteousness.

The push and pull of Willie’s threat to steal the piano and Berniece’s insistence that it stay shakes the spirit of the home, and Malcolm Washington welcomes this invitation of magical realism into the story with a deft hand. Ghosts of Sutter wreak further havoc in the house as his apparition manifests in doorways or when water floods the top floor of Berniece’s house, mostly for Berniece’s pious eyes only (giving Boy Willie another reason to fire her). The home’s central locale is beautifully transformed by Washington and his ensemble cast from scenes of quiet hair-trigger tension to boastful unity in full song, showing every angle of showdown with violent storylines. Meanwhile, throughout it all, the piano stands firm and motionless in the center of the home, looming as an almost stubborn reminder of its ghostly inevitability.

Washington handles this allegory without using condescending over-explanations. Berniece and Boy Willie carry indignation and oppression in their approaches to the past. While intent on carrying the weight of the past and protecting her daughter from the knowledge of their ancestors’ heartache, Boy Willie proudly tries to act in spite of it, never fully accepting the past for all that it is. Composed out of empathy for all its perspectives (while allowing space for equal rebuttal), Washington’s film embraces how our confrontation with black history takes root differently in different bodies. In doing so, “The Piano Lesson” recognizes that discussion and engagement must be the first step to a solution.

At the cinema tomorrow. On Netflix November 22.