THE PIANO LESSON - Mark Reviews Movies

The Piano Lesson, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 22, 2024

Co-writer/director Malcolm Washington's The Piano Lesson takes August Wilson's 1987 play of the same name and transforms it into a ghost story. The play was, to a degree, because a few characters believe the spirit of a man is haunting the Pittsburgh house where the drama unfolds. A couple of them see the ghost, too, but to take the ghost as literally as the filmmakers do in this adaptation might be to miss the point of Wilson's story.

More broadly, the past is the real ghost of this tale, which revolves around a family argument about what's to be done, if anything, with an old piano, a family heirloom that came into said family's possession in a technically illegal but morally righteous way. They're a Black family, scattered around the country in 1936 but reuniting in this house when Boy Willie (John David Washington, the director's brother, with both notably being the sons of producer Denzel Washington) arrives with a plan for the piano.

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has arisen, following the death of a white man who owned a farm in Mississippi. Willie could buy that land and finally have the good life that his father, who stole the piano from that farm, was never able to.

There's a lot more to the back story of this family, since their forebears of only a generation ago were held in slavery by the farming family. There's a poetic justice to Willie's plan, then, to use the piano that the Sutter clan essentially stole from his family to take control of the land on which his ancestors were forced to worked. As played by Washington, the man seems obsessed with making that cosmic retribution into a reality, as much as he wants the farm for more practical reasons.

The conflict here is deeper than the fate of the piano and potential presence of a ghost in the house, but while the confines of the stage have an intrinsic way of focusing our attention on the characters in a drama, a movie's ability to create perspective and draw focus is basically limitless. Here, Washington and Virgil Williams' screenplay takes us out of the house, into the past, and to see that ghost along with the characters who are convinced it's real. The scope of the story expands, to be sure, but along the way, the movie loses sight of the characters and conflict at the heart of this drama.

That's not on account of the cast, which includes Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts (with these first four playing roles they had in a 2022 Broadway revival of the show), Danielle Deadwyler, and Corey Hawkins. It's an impressive collection of actors, who bring a lot to the lengthy scenes of dialogue we expect from a movie adaptation of a stage play, but as a filmmaker, Washington seems hesitant to simply let the power of the source material be enough.

The central conflict is between brother and sister Willie, with his plan to buy the farm, and Berniece (Deadwyler), who inherited the piano from the siblings' mother after her death. The sister lives with the siblings' uncle Doaker (Jackson), who helped their father take the piano from the farmhouse but was nowhere to be found when a posse tracked down Willie and Berniece's father.

That all of those men in the posse died under mysterious circumstances, after falling or being pushed into a well, makes some think a killer is involved and others believe the ghosts of the dead are seeking justice. Berniece thinks her brother might have had something to do with the farmer's recent death, especially since it now allows Willie the opportunity to buy the land.

The tension of the drama is among the family, not only about the piano, but also matters of underlying philosophy and outlook. Willie believes he's owed the land, because of what happened to his ancestors and his father. Berniece just wants to put the past behind her, because it's filled with far too much pain. Some of that Willie knows, but in a potent scene, Berniece tells her brother of their mother's anguish and why the piano is so important to her beyond its potential monetary value. Willie has been too focused on various schemes, including one that got Berniece's husband and the father of her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) killed, and future plans to even consider such things.

Such scenes are engrossing, because they allow these actors to dig into and revel in the dialogue of one of America's great playwrights. Washington and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis' camera is surprisingly nimble in these moments, moving within the small spaces of the house to follow the conversations and staying put when the filmmakers know Deadwyler or someone else must—and, especially in her case, will—command a scene.

The flow of this extended argument and revealing of what defines these characters, though, is routinely interrupted by flashbacks, scenes outside of the house, and those encounters with the ghost, which are staged like stuff from a generic horror movie. They may add a "cinematic" quality—whatever that means—to The Piano Lesson, but the heart of this material is—or, at least, should be—the characters, the ideas, and drama, not of a literal ghost story, but of the ghosts of the past defining who these characters are and what they want now.

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