Fences (4/5 Stars)

 “Fences” is obviously adapted from a play. It helps to keep reminding yourself of this as you watch. That way you can get past the long speeches in confined areas without succumbing to the unreality of all. People act differently within the confines of a play and when they are brought into the wide open of movies it can seem weird. So it is best to come into this movie with that expectation.

The biggest choice any adapter of a play needs to make is how much of the talking of the play should be ditched for scenes of action. Director Denzel Washington ditches so little of the lines that it hardly makes sense for to see “Fences” as a movie. If you can see it as a play, do that instead, the immediacy of the live medium will make it more exciting and easy to follow. Not that “Fences” is a bad adaptation. Denzel’s directs in long takes and makes everyone speak very quickly. This helps move the whole thing along even if it must as designed stay in a backyard for the most part.

Denzel stars as Troy Maxson, an arrogant man who bitterly notices that his life was unfair and that he is too old to get a better one. He is a garbage truck hauler with ambitions to be a garbage truck driver. He also wants to turn back the clock about thirty years and play baseball in the major leagues. He once was a very good ball player., but as the play goes along it becomes clearer and clearer that he didn’t really have a chance to make it. Everything went against him: racism, non-existent parents, his own character. It is hard to tell where societies ills end and where his weaknesses start. This blinds him to the promise of his children, his relatively good life, and his own faults. There are several dramatic scenes that start with this man being on the high road talking a lot and end with his moral grandstanding backfiring. A good example is when his grown son, a musician, asks to borrow ten dollars. He makes a big scene about how his son should get a real job and not mooch. Then it turns out that Denzel was in prison for his son’s childhood and really does owe his son ten dollars every now and again no matter how old he is.

His wife, played by Viola Davis, is a standard long suffering wife. She is an upstanding reasonable woman, the sort of character whose personality is sacrificed to provide a foil to more complex and interesting people. Someday someone might make a story about a guy like Denzel, (“which has happened many times before think “Death of a Salesman”) about a woman instead. Maybe once the 60s roll around again.

All in all, there is great acting in “Fences.” There is almost nothing else and no potential for anything else. And I’m not sure if anyone else noticed, but there is only one fence in “Fences.” This movie should really be called “Fence.”